Before Amara told Kolade, she went to see Folake. She did not make an appointment. Folake was in the garden at the Ikoyi house when a staff member led Amara through. She looked up, saw her face and dismissed the staff with a quiet word.
“You know,” Folake said.
Amara stopped.
Not a question.
“Apparently I am the last person who does.”
Folake closed her eyes briefly.
“Sit.”
“I don’t want tea.”
“I wasn’t going to offer it.”
That almost disarmed her.
Almost.
Amara remained standing. “How long?”
Folake did not pretend not to understand.
“I knew Chiara was searching for you twenty-three years ago.”
“So you knew when I was nine.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know before that?”
“No. I did not know she was pregnant when Matteo died.”
“Did your husband?”
“I don’t know.”
Amara laughed sharply. “Everyone in this family says that when the answer is inconvenient.”
Folake absorbed it.
“Chiara contacted me through a priest who knew both families,” she said. “She needed to know whether the child she had left in Lagos was alive. By then you were with the Okonkwos.”
“And you found me.”
“Yes.”
“You told her.”
“Yes.”
“You watched me.”
Folake’s face tightened. “From a distance.”
“That phrase is becoming very popular.”
“I made sure you were safe. School fees were never interfered with. No one approached the Okonkwos. Your records remained protected.”
“Did you pay for anything?”
“No.”
“Did Chiara?”
“No. The Okonkwos raised you. We did not buy a place in that.”
The answer mattered more than Amara wanted it to.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Folake looked toward the house.
“Because Chiara asked me not to.”
“And that was enough?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
A long silence.
“Because my husband killed your father.”
The words were so direct that Amara stopped moving. Folake’s voice remained low.
“I did not know when it happened. I knew there had been a falling-out. I knew Matteo was dead. Years later, I found enough to understand what Ade had done.”
“When?”
“Before Kolade found the folder.”
“How long before?”
“Eleven years.”
Amara stared at her.
“You stayed.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Folake’s face changed in a way Amara had not seen before: no composure, only the terrible complexity of a woman forced to answer a question she had asked herself too often.
“Because people imagine marriage becomes simple the moment one truth becomes unforgivable. It does not. There was Kolade. There were other people dependent on the company. There were forty years of life inside the same house. There was fear. There was love, which I resented. There was cowardice.”
She looked at Amara.
“I stayed for reasons that do not become good simply because I can explain them.”
Amara thought of Ade’s argument about context. Folake understood context too. The difference was that she did not offer it as innocence.
“Why the perfume?” Amara asked suddenly.
Folake’s hand moved unconsciously toward her wrist.
“Chanel No. 5.”
Folake looked genuinely startled.
“Chiara wears it.”
“Yes.”
“Why do you?”
Folake was silent.
Then: “Because I needed one thing I could not allow myself to forget.”
Amara did not ask more. She had reached the limit of what she could carry from this house. At the gate, Folake called after her.
“Amara.”
She turned.
“I am sorry.”
Amara looked at the woman who had known her name for twenty-three years.
“I don’t know what anyone expects me to do with apologies yet.”
“Nothing,” Folake said. “You owe us nothing.”
That answer followed Amara all the way back to the office.