Kolade came to the conference room the next afternoon carrying two coffees. Amara looked at the cup he placed beside her laptop.
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“No.”
“How do you know how I take it?”
“You drink it black before noon and add milk after two.”
She looked at him. Kolade seemed to realise only then that the observation sounded intimate.
“I notice things,” he said.
“That is inconvenient.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Amara took the coffee anyway.
They spent three hours reviewing the settlement references in the access logs. The word settlement appeared repeatedly from 2018 onward, but the underlying documents were missing from the folder structure available to Amara. Their absence had shape. References in minutes. Payment codes. Legal-fee entries. Everything except the agreements themselves.
“Your father’s office?” she asked.
“Likely.”
“That is progress.”
“What?”
“You said likely instead of maybe.”
Kolade gave her a flat look. She smiled into the coffee. Around six, the office began emptying. Rain gathered against the windows, turning the city beyond them into smeared light.
Kolade looked at the document in his hand. “Why did you say foster?”
The question was careful. Amara stopped typing.
He immediately shook his head. “You don’t have to answer.”
“No. It’s fine.”
She leaned back.
“I don’t remember my biological parents. I was at a convent briefly, then in two placements before the Okonkwos. They became my legal guardians when I was seven.”
“You never found the original records?”
“I never looked very hard.”
That surprised him.
“You investigate everyone else.”
“Professionally.”
“Still.”
Amara considered the rain.
“When I was younger, I wanted to know everything. Then I realised the answer might be a dead woman, a frightened teenager, a man who never knew I existed, or people who knew and simply did not want me. The Okonkwos were real. Eventually that felt like enough.”
Kolade said nothing. It was one of the things she was beginning to like about him: he did not rush to improve painful statements.
“My mother would say that not asking is still a kind of decision,” he said eventually.
“Your mother says interesting things.”
“Yes.”
“She also looks at me strangely.”
Kolade’s eyes lifted.
“What do you mean?”
“At dinner. When I said fostered.”
He frowned. “I noticed my father.”
“Your mother too.”
The room changed slightly. Amara watched him absorb it.
“Do you think they know something?” he asked.
“I think I don’t have enough evidence to think anything yet.”
“Professional answer.”
“The useful kind.”
Kolade nodded, but the thought stayed with him. He began gathering the documents as thunder rolled somewhere over the lagoon.
“Do you need a driver?” he asked.
“I have one.”
“Good.”
No insistence. No manufactured reason to extend the evening. He reached the door, then stopped.
“Amara.”
She looked up. He seemed about to ask something else.
Instead he said, “If this becomes personal in a way you did not agree to, you can stop.”
The sentence irritated her immediately.
“Why would it become personal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then don’t decide what I can handle before I know what it is.”
He blinked.
She heard the sharpness in her own voice and did not take it back.
Kolade nodded once. “Fair.”
He left.
Amara stared after him.
She was not angry because he had offered her an exit.
She was angry because some part of her had heard the sentence as a warning.