The lost soul

TheManInGreySuit

Amara couldn't sleep that night,

She sat on the floor of a cousin of Mama Ngozi's, a woman named Auntie Rose who agreed to hide her for a few days without asking too many questions, and she stared at the wall until the sun came up, turning one thought over and over in my mind.

Four years. It had been four years since she climbed out of that kitchen window, four years since she heard her father's voice or seen Felicia's face, four years of building herself a small, quiet life out of nothing. And now, out of nowhere, someone was standing in a hospital hallway asking questions about a girl from a house near Ikeja.

Amara told herself it didn't have to mean anything. Lagos was full of well-dressed men asking careful questions anyway. Maybe it had nothing to do with me at all. Two days later, the same man found her.

She was just standing outside a small provisions store, buying garri with the little money she had left, when a black car pulled up slowly beside her and a voice calling her name. It wasn't loud or threatening, just calm, the way you'd call the name of someone you'd been looking forward to meeting.

"Amara Richard?

She froze. In recent years, no one had called her by her full name. On the street, she was just Amara. To Mama Ngozi, she was just Amara. That second name, her father's name, belonged to a life she had buried a long time ago.

Amara wanted to run. Everything in her told her to run. But something about the man stepping out of that car stopped her. He was older, maybe in his fifties, dressed simply in a grey suit like he had seen better days, and he didn't look like Amara’s father or Felicia or anyone from that house.

"My name is Barrister Chukwuma," he said, holding up both hands slowly, the way you'd calm a scared child. "I am not here to hurt you or take you anywhere you don't want to go. I've been looking for you for almost a year, Amara. Not for your father. For your mother."

"My mother is dead," Amara said. Her voice was sharper than it used to be.

"I know," he said gently. "I was her lawyer before she died. And I have spent the last year trying to find her daughter, because your mother left something behind that legally belongs to you, and to no one else."

She didn't believe him. Not at first. She had learned the hard way that adults who claimed to have your best interests at heart usually wanted something from you in return. Amara told him exactly that, standing there on the street with my bag of garri clutched against my chest like a shield.

He didn't argue with her. He simply reached into his jacket and pulled out a small photograph, worn soft at the corners, and held it out.

It was a photograph of her mother. Young, smiling, standing in front of a small shop with a hand-painted sign above the door. She had never seen it before in her life, and yet something about her face in that picture, the shape of her eyes, the way she held herself, hit her so hard she had to lean against the store wall to keep herself from falling.

"Your mother owned a small trading business before she married your father," Barrister Chukwuma said quietly. "It grew, slowly, over the years she ran it. When she died, everyone assumed the business died with her, sold off in pieces, the money absorbed into your father's affairs. But your mother was a careful woman. Before she got sick, she placed a portion of that business, and the land it stood on, into a trust in your name. It could not be touched, sold, or claimed by anyone else, not until you turned twenty-one, or came forward yourself to claim it."

Her mouth had gone dry. "Why didn't anyone tell me this before?"

"Because your father made sure no one could find you to tell you," he said, and something in his voice went in a new way. "Amara, I need to ask you something difficult, and I need you to answer honestly. Do you know why your stepmother treated you the way she did? Why did your father allow it?"

She shakes her head. I asked myself the same question every day for over four years and never got an answer that made sense.

"Because as long as you stayed in that house, unhappy but around, the trust remained frozen and untouchable, but also unclaimed. Your father couldn't touch it while you were a minor living under his roof; the law protected it too well for that. But if you disappeared, if you went missing long enough, there were legal paths that could eventually let him petition to have the trust dissolved and folded back into the family estate, which he controls." Barrister Chukwuma paused, watching my face carefully. "I believe, Amara, that your stepmother's cruelty was never simply cruelty. I believe it was designed, slowly, over years, to push you out of that house and make you disappear, so that eventually, they could take what your mother left for you without ever having to explain why."

The garri bag slipped out of her hands. She didn't notice until she heard it hit the ground.

Everything she thought she knew and understood about her life suddenly rearranged itself in that single moment, standing on a dusty Lagos street with a stranger holding a photograph of her dead mother. The starving. The old clothes. The nights she spent afraid to close my eyes. None of it had simply been hatred. They were just cruel.

It had been a plan. And she had been the one thing standing in the way of it not because of who she was, but because of what her mother had quietly, secretly left behind for her before she knew how badly her daughter would need it.

"How much," Amara whispered, "is the trust worth?"

Barrister Chukwuma told her the numbers, and she asked him to repeat it, because the first time, she misheard.

It was enough money to change everything. Enough to explain, finally and completely, why a man who could not be bothered to love his own daughter had also, somehow, never quite managed to let her go entirely, and why every year it felt like someone was quietly making sure she never came back.

"There is a deadline," Barrister Chukwuma said, his voice dropping lower, glancing once down the street as though checking who might be listening. "Your twenty-first birthday. If you do not come forward and legally claim the trust before then, under the specific terms your mother wrote, ownership defaults back to her next of kin. Your father."

"When is the deadline?" Amara asked,

He looked at her steadily, the traffic roaring past them on the street, her whole future was hanging on whatever he was about to say next.

"Six weeks from today," he said. "And Amara, I don't think I am the only person who has been searching for you. I believe your father's lawyers have been looking too, and unlike me, they are not hoping you come forward to claim what's yours. They are hoping you never do."

(To be continued in Chapter 4...)