Chiara found Dante on the balcony of his hotel room with Lagos beneath him and the city’s noise softened by height.
“You are watching her again,” she said.
Dante did not turn. “No.”
“You have your liar’s shoulders.”
He glanced back. “My what?”
“Your father had them too.”
That got his attention. Chiara stepped outside and closed the door behind her. She had been in Lagos for less than forty-eight hours and already regretted agreeing to let Dante control the timing.
“He found me first,” Dante said.
“Who?”
“Kolade. At least through the audit. He gave her access to the old records.”
Chiara looked toward the lights of the city.
“Perhaps he is not his father.”
Dante’s expression hardened. “You have not met him.”
“Neither had you when you decided what he was.”
“He is an Adeyemi.”
“So is Folake.”
Dante fell silent. That name still complicated his anger. Folake had quietly answered questions when Chiara needed to know whether Amara was alive. She had been the only person inside Ade’s family Chiara allowed herself to trust, and even that trust had been narrow.
“You should tell Amara,” Chiara said.
“Not yet.”
“When?”
“When the evidence is complete.”
Chiara laughed softly, without humour.
“You sound like a man who thinks evidence has an ending.”
“It does.”
“No. It has a point at which you decide you have enough.”
Dante’s jaw tightened.
“If I tell her now, she may withdraw.”
“Then she withdraws.”
“You know what is at stake.”
“Yes. My daughter.”
The words hit him. Chiara stepped closer.
“You keep speaking as though the case is the thing we are protecting. Matteo did not hide her so that more than three decades later you could deliver her back into the same war with better credentials.”
“That is not what I am doing.”
“What are you doing?”
Dante looked away.
Chiara waited.
He had inherited Matteo’s stubbornness and Ade’s talent for convincing himself control was necessary. She had spent years pretending not to see the second inheritance because Ade was not his blood. Perhaps blood had never been the point.
“Do you know what frightens me?” she asked.
Dante said nothing.
“That your father died refusing to let powerful men turn other people into costs. And you found your sister and immediately calculated what she could achieve for you.”
Dante flinched.
Good.
He needed to.
“I love her,” he said.
“You do not know her.”
The sentence was cruel. Chiara meant it.
“You love the sister you lost. The idea. The baby I told you about. Amara is a woman with a life that happened without us.”
Dante’s eyes burned.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Meet her before you need something from her.”
“I already need something.”
“I know.”
That was the tragedy. Chiara touched his face, briefly.
“Then at least stop pretending your silence is protection.”
She went inside. Dante remained on the balcony. Below him, Lagos stretched in every direction.
For years he had imagined the city as the place where his father’s story had been interrupted.
Now his sister lived somewhere inside it.
And the longer he waited, the more likely he was to become another person she would one day have to forgive for deciding first.