The independent reviewer assigned to Amara was named Tunde Balogun, and he had no interest in making her comfortable. She liked him immediately.
Not personally.
Professionally.
He arrived with thirty years of fraud investigations behind him and the expression of a man who had built a career out of assuming everybody’s favourite explanation was probably incomplete. Their first review lasted five hours. He challenged the Greco payment classification. He challenged the inference that the Malta routing structure connected current transfers to Matteo’s original trust. He challenged whether Kolade’s recollection of discovering the Apapa folder could be relied on without a documented chain of custody. Then he challenged Amara.
“You want Ade Senior to have killed your father.”
The sentence stopped the room. Amara looked at him.
“No.”
“You want the evidence to confirm it.”
“I want the evidence to establish what happened.”
“That is the answer forensic accountants are trained to give.”
“It is also the answer I mean.”
Tunde leaned back.
“Prove it.”
Amara felt anger rise and let it stay where it was.
“How?”
“Show me one conclusion you have weakened since discovering Matteo is your father.”
She opened her working papers. The alleged murder finding had originally read payment consistent with remuneration for an arranged killing. She had changed it to payment temporally associated with an undisclosed arrangement concluded around Matteo Greco’s death because no document yet established what the payment purchased. Tunde read both versions.
“Why did you weaken it?”
“Because the first sentence said more than the evidence did.”
“Even though you believe it?”
“Yes.”
He moved to Dante’s access. Amara had classified the ghost credential as unauthorized access directed by a related party to the investigation.
“You could have called him a whistleblower.”
“He is my brother. That makes generous language more dangerous, not less.”
Tunde looked at her for a long moment. Then closed the file.
“I am going to make your life unpleasant for the rest of this engagement.”
“Good.”
He smiled.
“You say that now.”
The review continued. By the end, three findings were strengthened, two were narrowed and one was removed entirely because the supporting documents could not survive challenge. Amara hated losing it. That was how she knew the process was working.
As Tunde packed his papers, he said, “You know the conflict does not disappear because you disclose it.”
“I know.”
“It becomes something other people can see and manage with you.”
Amara thought of every person in her life who had treated secrecy as protection.
“Maybe that is the point,” she said.
Tunde looked at her.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She was beginning to understand that transparency was not the absence of bias, grief or love.
It was refusing to let those things operate in darkness.