Joyce listened to the recording three times before calling Michael Okafor. The first time she heard facts.
The second time she heard Victoria's fear. The third time she heard a dead woman trying to enter a room she had been excluded from for twenty-two years.
Michael agreed to meet that evening in a quiet restaurant in Yaba. He arrived early and stood when Joyce approached. At fifty-two, he had grey at his temples and the careful politeness of a man who had learned not to expect good news.
Joyce placed a folder between them.
"Before I show you this, I need you to understand that I am not certain yet."
Michael's throat moved. "Your mother said you found something."
"I found someone."
She slid a photograph across the table.
Daniel at his university graduation.
Michael stared at it.
The colour changed in his face. He did not touch the photograph immediately.
"Who is this?"
"Daniel Adebayo."
Michael finally picked it up.
His fingers began to shake.
"He looks like Emeka."
"Who?"
"My brother. When he was young."
His eyes filled so quickly Joyce looked away for a moment.
"Joyce." His voice was barely audible. "Is this my son?"
"I think he may be."
Michael pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth.
He asked for Daniel's age twice even though Joyce had already told him. He asked what work he did, whether he was healthy, whether he liked football. The questions came too quickly, as though twenty-two years of fatherhood could be recovered by gathering facts.
Joyce answered what she knew and refused what felt too private.
"Does he look happy?" Michael asked finally.
That question stopped her.
"Yes," she said. "I think he is."
Michael closed his eyes. Relief and grief crossed his face at the same time.
He told Joyce he had married briefly years after Amara disappeared and divorced without children. He did not offer the information as tragedy; only context. "People kept telling me to move on," he said. "As if moving on answers a question."
Joyce understood then that Daniel would not be entering an empty space in Michael's life. He would be entering twenty-two years of imagined versions of himself - the child Michael might have raised, the birthdays he never knew existed. That was another reason to move carefully.
"Good. At least they did not take that too."
For twenty-two years he had carried two questions: why Amara disappeared and whether she left because she stopped loving him. Grace's confession had replaced those questions with something worse. Now there was a new possibility so enormous he seemed afraid to breathe near it.
"Tell me about the last time you spoke to her," Joyce said.
Michael stared at Daniel's photograph.
"She called me. She said she was afraid something would happen before I came back. I thought she meant childbirth." He swallowed. "I told her she worried too much."
"Did she tell you where she was delivering?"
"No. She said a woman was helping her. I was angry she wouldn't give me the address."
He laughed once, brokenly.
"I thought she was punishing me for leaving."
Joyce let the silence remain.
"She had chosen a name," Michael said.
"For the baby?"
"Samuel."
His mouth trembled into something almost like a smile.
"I told her he would hate it."
Joyce looked at Daniel's photograph again.
"He is Daniel."
Michael nodded slowly, absorbing the name as if it belonged to someone he had already lost and only just found.
"I need a DNA sample," Joyce said.
"Anything."
"If it confirms what we suspect, Daniel must be told carefully."
"Of course."
"He has parents he loves. He has a life."
Michael's eyes lifted.
"I do not want to take anything from him."
His voice broke.
"I only want to know what they took from me."
Outside the restaurant, an old silver car waited beneath a dead streetlight. Mrs. Eze sat behind the wheel.
She had followed Joyce from Surulere after recognising the rented car. She had watched Joyce enter the restaurant with a folder. Then she saw Michael leave holding a photograph.
She recognised him from the old days after several seconds.
Amara's man.
The one who had searched.
Mrs. Eze's stomach tightened.
She started the engine.
Some secrets became more dangerous when they were old enough to believe they had survived.