CHAPTER FOURTEEN-The Quietest Consequence
579 Words
Months passed,
Life did what life always does 'it continued'
Tosin found contract work with a smaller firm. Nothing prestigious, nothing permanent, but honest, Safe.
He kept his head down again.
Not out of fear this timbut e, out of understanding.
He no longer believed competence protected anyone.
Only boundaries did.
Kemi moved into a modest apartment near the mainland. therapy twice a month, fewer mirrors. fewer lies.
She began sleeping through the night.
some evenings, she cooked for one and didn’t cry.
Progress, Dr. Bello called it.
Healing felt less like growth and more like subtraction,
removing excuses.
removing the person she useSundaye.
One sunday, while clearing old email archives, she found it,
a bank alert,
two years old,
Unopened, the
subject device login notification suspicious Access
Time stamp: 2:13 a.m.
Location home network.
Kunle’s home.
Her credentials.
She stared at it for a long time.
Memory aligned slowly.
That night,
Kunle awake beside,
Quiet,
not sleeping like she thought.
She understood then.
Not the full story.
Just enough.
Kunle hadn’t gone to the bank.
Hadn’t reported.
Hadn’t confronted.
He had simply checked.
Looked.
Verified.
And then stepped back.
Silence wasn’t ignorance.
It was knowledge.
Chosen.
Deliberate.
He hadn’t destroyed her.
He had allowed truth to destroy itself.
Tears came not from guilt this time.
From clarity.
Some men shout.
Some men fight.
Kunle had simply withdrawn his hands and let gravity work.
That had been the loudest consequence of all.
Weeks later, Tosin walked past a supermarket after work.
Fluorescent lights buzzed inside.
Carts clattered.
Ordinary.
He almost smiled.
So much of his life had changed because of a place like that.
Funny how fate preferred mundane settings.
He didn’t go in.
He kept walking.
Forward.
Behind him, traffic swallowed the sound of his steps.
Ahead, the road stretched clean and uncertain.
No guarantees.
No reversals.
Just distance.
And for the first time,werefelt like enough.
Some transfers could be corrected.
Others stayed written into the ledger forever.
Not loud.
Not dramatic,
Just permanent,
The quietest consequences always were.
Ledger
Years later, Tosin still counted things,
Not money anymore.
Not transfers or approvals
He counted mornings ,
He counted how many days passed without remembering her first,
He counted the small mercies, steady work, quiet sleep, the absence of headlines,
healing, he discovered, was arithmetic.
Subtraction, mostly.
Less guilt,
less anger,
less wanting,
Sometimes, on his way home, he passed a branch of Emerald Trust Bank. The logo had changed. New colors. New management. New staff who would never know his name.
Institutions forgot quickly.
People didn’t.
He would pause across the street, watching employees hurry out at closing time, laughing, checking their phones, alive in ways that felt untouched.
He didn’t envy them.
he simply hoped they were careful.
across the city, Kemi kept a different count.
Therapy sessions completed.
Nights without dreams.
Weeks without reaching for her phone to text someone she no longer should.
She learned to sit with herself without flinching.
Loneliness no longer felt like an emergency.
Just weather.
Something that passed.
They never met again.
Not because fate prevented it.
Because they chose not to.
Some connections weren’t meant to be reopened.
Like old accounts, like archived files, like transfers long settled.
Better left closed.
In the end, nothing exploded.
No grand apologies.
No dramatic reunions.
Just two people walking forward separately, quieter than before, carrying lessons numbers never taught them.
Some consequences shout.
The real ones whisper.
And then they stay.
- Writer
