WAHALA DOES NOT ANNOUNCE ITSELF
1154 Words
“He says,” Zion continued, and his voice was doing something careful now, something deliberate, “that the right person would be someone who could not be intimidated by this family or this situation. Who would not disappear when things became difficult. Who would—” He stopped.
“You don’t have to read it aloud,” I said.
“He says,” Zion said quietly, “that I would know her because she would be the one person in any room who told me the truth without calculating what it cost her first.”
The silence that followed was a different quality from all the previous silences.
I looked up.
He was looking at me.
I looked back.
I had survived a lot in the past three weeks. I had read forty-three pages of a prenuptial agreement and found six problems. I had located a recording in a sealed office. I had built a forty-one page of Beautiful Lie for a courtroom.
I was entirely unprepared for this.
“Zion—” I started.
The boardroom door opened.
Tobenna’s head appeared.
He looked at our faces.
Looked at the letter on the table.
“I can absolutely come back,” he said.
“Yes,” Zion and I said simultaneously.
He disappeared immediately.
The door closed.
I looked at the letter.
“Three weeks,” I said finally. “We have three weeks before the court case. And a wedding the week after.”
“Yes,” Zion said.
“We should focus.”
“Yes,” he said again.
Neither of us moved.
Outside, Lagos kept going. Loud and alive and entirely indifferent to two people sitting in a fortieth floor boardroom discovering, somewhat inconveniently, that a transaction had become something else entirely.
“Amara.”
“Don’t,” I said quietly. “Not yet.”
He was silent for a moment.
“Okay,” he said. Gently. Without pressure.
I picked up my pen.
He picked up his copy of the case files.
We got back to work.
But the letter sat between us on the table for the rest of the afternoon.
And neither of us moved it.
Downstairs, in the lobby, Tobenna was telling Biodun the security guard with great enthusiasm that he was witnessing the early stages of the most important romantic development in Okonkwo family history.
Biodun, who had seen many things in fifteen years of lobby security and had developed strong opinions about minding his business, nodded politely and returned to his post. Tobenna ordered shawarma for the two of them from a restaurant down the street and decided it was reason enough to call it a celebration.
The Beautiful Lie was completed on a Friday evening at eight forty-three pm.
I know the exact time because I looked at my watch when I typed the final full stop and thought: forty-one pages of the most convincing legal fiction I have ever constructed, and nobody will ever publish it, and somehow that is the funniest thing that has happened to me since my father wore his best agbada to sell me.
I sent it to Mr. Eze with a note: Please review and confirm it reads as genuine. Also please eat dinner. You look like a man who forgets.
His response came forty minutes later: Page thirty-one. The citations are excellent. I’ve eaten. Have you?
I had not.
I ordered suya from Glover Court Suya three streets away that stayed open until midnight and ate it at my desk with zero remaining dignity and several critical case documents.
I enjoyed the suya.
Some things in Lagos, at least, remained dependable.
Zion found me there at nine-thirty.
Not found — that implies surprise. He walked in with the air of a man who had already calculated where I would be and acted on it.
He looked at the suya wrapper on my desk.
He looked at me.
“You could have called downstairs,” he said. “The kitchen was still open.”
“I wanted suya.”
“The kitchen makes suya.”
I stared at him. “Your kitchen makes suya?”
“Yes.”
“From scratch?”
“The chef trained in—”
“Zion.” I held up a hand. “I grew up in Lekki Phase 2. I need a moment to process the fact that suya is available on demand in this building before I can continue this conversation.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Just slightly.
I pointed at him. “Don’t.”
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
“You were about to do the almost-smile. I’ve catalogued it. Don’t.”
He sat down. “You’ve catalogued my expressions?”
“I’m a lawyer. I catalogue everything.” I slid the Beautiful Lie across the desk. “Mr. Eze has approved it. It’s ready to upload to the account.”
He picked it up. Read the first page. Then looked at me over the top of it with an expression I didn’t have a catalogue entry for yet.
“Amara.”
“Yes.”
“This is very good.”
“I know,” I said. “The real one is better.”
We uploaded the Beautiful Lie to the account at ten-fifteen.
Zion handled the upload himself — hands steady, expression neutral, the embodiment of a man who had decided that if his father’s enemy wanted to read his documents, he would curate exactly what they read.
“How long before Valentina receives it?” I asked.
“Daniel’s uploads were every seventy-two hours,” he said. “The next scheduled window is tomorrow night. She’ll have it by Sunday morning.”
“Good.” I started packing my bag. “That gives her two and a half weeks to build an entire courtroom strategy around an argument we are not going to make.”
“And our real strategy?”
“Is in my head and on an encrypted drive that has never touched this building’s network.” I looked at him. “The only copies are with me, you, and Mr. Eze. Nothing written anywhere in this office. Nothing discussed on any phone connected to this floor.”
He nodded.
I stood, gathered my things.
“There is one more thing,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Fashola.” I adjusted my bag strap. “She needs to stay operational until after the court case. If we remove her now, Emeka will know we’ve swept the inside and he’ll find another angle we haven’t identified. But after the ruling—”
“After the ruling,” Zion said, “she is removed, referred to the appropriate authorities, and my mother gets to have the conversation with Barrister Nwosu that she has been composing in her head since I told her his name.”
I almost felt sorry for Barrister Nwosu.
- Writer
