The lost soul

SixWeeks

Amara didn't go back to Aunty Rose's house that night. Instead, she let Barrister Chukwuma drive her to a small restaurant a few streets away, somewhere quiet enough to talk without the whole neighborhood listening. She sat across from him with her hands wrapped around her stomach, her mind still trying to catch up with everything she was been told.

"I need proof," I said finally. "Proof that you are who you say you are. Proof that any of this is real."

Good," he said, and for the first time since he'd stopped his car beside me, he almost smiled. "That's exactly the right thing to ask. A girl who believes every stranger with a photograph doesn't survive long in this city. Come to my office tomorrow. I'll show you everything — the trust documents, your mother's will, the land records. You can bring someone with you, if it makes you feel safer."

She thought of Mama Ngozi, still healing in her hospital bed, and her chest tightened with guilt. She had told her to go, to not let her troubles bury whatever was in her. She never understood, that day, that she might have already known there was something bigger waiting for her than a small shop near Oshodi.

"I'll come alone," Amara said. She learned, over four years, that trusting too many people might be dangerous.

His office was small but organized, tucked on the second floor of an old building not far from the High Court. He was telling the truth. She sat across his desk for almost three hours the next day, going through papers with her mother's handwriting on some of them, her signature careful and neat, nothing like the woman she barely remembered but somehow recognized anyway, in the shape of the letters, in the way she dotted her notes.

The business she'd built was small compared to what it could have grown into, but the land, the land was worth more than she could have imagined. A plot in a part of Lagos that had been quiet and cheap fifteen years ago and was now surrounded by new development, worth easily ten times what it had been when she bought it.

"There's something else," Barrister Chukwuma said, sliding one more folder across the desk. "Your mother didn't just leave you land and a small trading business. She left a letter. I was instructed to give it to you only once you understood everything else once you knew enough to understand what she was trying to protect you from."Amara's hands shook as she opened them. The paper had yellowed slightly with age, but her handwriting was still clear.

My dearest Amara,

If you are reading this, it means I am no longer there to explain it to you myself, and it means you have found your way back to what belongs to you, which tells me you are stronger than I ever had the chance to see you.

I loved your father once. I want you to know that, even by the time you read this, I doubt you will believe it. But I watched him change in ways that frightened me long before you were born, and I watched the kind of women he began keeping company with, and I understood, long before I got sick, that if anything happened to me, you would need something no one could take away from you , not him, not her, not anyone.

I don't know what they have told you about me. I don't know what they have done to you, though I fear, wherever you are reading this, that it has not been kind. I am sorry, my love, more sorry than these words can hold, that I could not stay to protect you myself.

Do not let this money make you hard. Do not let what they did to you decide who you become. But do not, under any circumstances, let them take this from you either. This is yours. You earned it simply by surviving them, and I need you to claim it, not for revenge, but because it is the last thing I have left to give you, and I need you to have it.

I love you. I have always loved you. Go and build something they can never take from you again.

Mummy

She didn't remember crying. But Barrister Chukwuma quietly left the room to give her privacy, and she sat alone with that letter pressed against her chest for what felt like a very long time, four years of grief she had never properly let herself feel finally breaking loose all at once.

When she spoke again, her voice came out steadier than I expected.

"I want to claim it," she said. "All of it. Whatever I need to do, tell me, and I'll do it."

Barrister Chukwuma nodded slowly, but the relief on his face didn't fully arrive. Something else sat behind his eyes instead — caution, maybe, or worry.

"There's a complication," he said. "Your father's lawyers filed papers two weeks ago, quietly, in a different court, arguing that you should be declared legally deceased. Missing for four years, no contact with family, no official record of your whereabouts. If that petition succeeds before you formally claim the trust yourself, the money defaults to your father as next of kin, regardless of what your mother's will says. Legally dead is legally dead, Amara. It doesn't matter that you're sitting right here in front of me, alive."

"When is the hearing?" Amara asked.

"Four weeks from now," he said. "Which means we have four weeks to build a case strong enough to prove not only that you're alive, but that your stepmother's treatment towards you caused you to flee and if we can prove that, it doesn't just secure the trust. It exposes exactly what they did to you, publicly, in a courtroom, in front of your father."

Something cold and steady settled into Amara's chest, replacing the shaking that had been there since the night before.

"What do you need from me?"

"Everything," he said. "Every memory, every scar, every person who might have seen what happened in that house, no matter how small. I know how hard that will be to relive. But Amara, I need to be honest with you about something else too."

He hesitated, glancing toward the window, toward the street below where the traffic never seemed to stop moving.

"Your father's lawyer isn't just anyone," he said carefully. "It's a woman named Eunice Folasade one of the most aggressive family law attorneys in this city. She doesn't lose often. And two days ago, my assistant noticed a car parked outside this building for almost three hours, watching who came and went."

My stomach dropped. "You think they know I've already found you."

"I think," Barrister Chukwuma said slowly, "that we no longer have the luxury of moving quietly. And I think, Amara, that before this is over, you are going to have to walk back into a courtroom and face your father for the first time in four years — with your stepmother sitting right beside him."

(To be continued in Chapter 5...)