Amara drove nowhere for almost an hour. Lagos moved around her as if the world had not acquired three new relatives between four o’clock and five. Hawkers appeared between cars. Horns argued at junctions. A bus conductor leaned halfway out of a door and shouted a destination with the urgent faith of a preacher. Everything remained offensively ordinary.
She finally told the driver to take her to the Okonkwos’ house. Then changed her mind before they reached Yaba.
“Home,” she said.
Her own apartment. She could not yet walk into the house where she had been raised and place Matteo, Chiara and Dante on the table between dinner plates. The Okonkwos had never lied about what they knew. They had told her the records were incomplete, that she could search when she wanted, that they would help. She had chosen not to search. That choice now felt like something other people had been quietly benefiting from.
Inside her apartment, Amara took off her shoes, set down her bag and stood in the middle of the sitting room without knowing what came next. There was no procedure for discovering that your father had been murdered before you were born. No checklist for learning your mother had watched from a distance while you grew up believing she might be dead. No professional standard for the brother who found you and decided your first usefulness to him would be as an auditor inside the company of the man who killed your father. Her phone buzzed.
Kolade.
She let it ring.
Again.
Then a message.
Are you all right?
The question was kind enough to hurt. Amara put the phone facedown. On her desk was the notebook she had used throughout the audit. She opened it to the first page.
WHAT HAPPENED TO MATTEO GRECO?
Beneath the question were dates, accounts and arrows. She stared at his name.
Father.
The word did not attach itself properly. The only father she had known was Emeka Okonkwo, who taught her long division at the dining table and made terrible tea and attended every school prize-giving even when work made him late. Matteo Greco had never taught her anything. Except perhaps one sentence she had read in his letter.
People cannot be an eventually.
She thought of the way it had struck her before she knew why. That frightened her more than resemblance would have. Another message came from Kolade.
I won’t keep calling. I’m here if you need anything.
Amara closed her eyes. He knew none of it.
Not yet.
Now she was withholding something from him that could materially change the audit. The realization brought shame with it. She opened the evidence register. The seventh letter was relevant. Her relationship to Matteo was relevant. Dante’s orchestration of her appointment was catastrophically relevant.
Independence was no longer a concept in a textbook. It was sitting in her apartment asking whether she could continue investigating her own father’s murder. Her phone rang again.
Temi.
Amara answered.
“You sound strange,” Temi said immediately.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“That is why.”
Amara looked at the notebook.
“I found my biological family.”
Silence.
Then Temi’s voice softened. “Okay.”
“My father is dead.”
Another pause.
“He was murdered.”
Temi inhaled.
“The Greco man?”
Amara shut her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Oh, Amara.”
“And my brother is the person who arranged for me to get the audit.”
This time Temi did not answer for several seconds.
“Say that again.”
“He found me four years ago. He knew who I was. He needed someone inside Adeyemi Group. So he put me there.”
Temi swore quietly. Amara almost laughed. Then the laugh became something else. She covered her mouth.
“Amara?”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
The words were not dramatic. They were simply true.
And because they were true, Amara began to cry.
Not loudly. Not beautifully. She sat on the floor beside the sofa with one hand over her face while thirty-two years of empty space acquired names faster than she could learn how to carry them.