SHATTERED💔

Chapter 8 — What Power Costs

‎The thing about living a double life is that eventually both lives start bleeding into each other.

‎Nana Boateng had managed to keep his clean.

‎For now.

‎His office was quiet at that hour. The building below had emptied of its suited employees and their controlled efficient movements. The city outside his floor-to-ceiling windows had shifted from its daytime gold into the amber and purple of an Accra evening — beautiful and indifferent as always.

‎He sat alone with a glass of water he hadn’t touched and a file he wasn’t reading.

‎His phone buzzed.

‎He looked at the screen.

‎Richard.

‎His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

‎He let it ring twice. Then picked up.

‎” Richard.”

‎” Nana my brother!!” The voice on the other end was warm and expansive in the way of men who have never once been held accountable for anything. “How is business?? I hear the new shipment from Tema port came through smoothly — our guys did well!!”

‎Our guys.

‎Nana closed his eyes briefly.

‎Twenty-three years.

‎Twenty-three years ago, he had been a different man — younger, hungrier, less careful. He had needed capital. Richard Mensah had offered a partnership that seemed simple at the time.

‎Nothing was ever simple.

‎” The shipment came through,” Nana said carefully. “We need to discuss distribution. Come to the warehouse on Thursday.”

‎” Of course, of course!! Always so serious Nana — you need to relax!! You know what they say — all work and no play—”

‎” Thursday Richard,” Nana said quietly. “Ten o’clock.”

‎He ended the call.

‎Set the phone down precisely.

‎Picked up the glass of water and finally drank.

‎Twenty-three years of partnership with a man he despised. Twenty-three years of smiling at Richard Mensah across boardroom tables and church pews and community dinners while knowing exactly what kind of man sat behind that warm, expansive smile.

‎He had known what Richard was long before Abena.

‎He had told himself it wasn’t his business.

‎That was the lie he had lived with the longest.

‎He opened his desk drawer and took out the photograph he kept there — separate from the one on the wall, this one older and more private. A young woman laughing at something outside the frame. Dark eyes. A particular tilt of the chin.

‎Abena’s mother.

‎Ama.

‎” I’m sorry,” he said to the photograph. The words were quiet and completely inadequate and he knew it. “I’m still sorry.”

‎He had loved her. In his way. In the limited and insufficient way of a man who had always put his empire before everything else.

‎He had let her go back to the village rather than fight for her because fighting would have meant explaining things he couldn’t explain. Exposing things he couldn’t expose.

‎And then she had died alone.

‎And Abena had grown up alone.

‎And Richard—

‎His hand tightened around the glass.

‎Richard had taken the one thing Nana could never get back for her.

‎And Nana had done nothing.

‎Because doing something meant destroying everything.

‎His phone buzzed again.

‎His head of security this time.

‎” Sir. The girl — Officer Asante. She’s left the village. Heading back to Accra.”

‎Nana set down the photograph.

‎” And the man?? Mensah??”

‎” Settled in the Albone apartment, sir. He started work today.”

‎” Good.”

‎He ended the call and stood, moving to the window, looking out over his city.

‎His daughter was coming back.

‎His secret.

‎His greatest failure.

‎And somewhere in a Labone apartment, the boy who had left her was sleeping under a roof Nana himself was paying for — bound by a contract designed to keep him away from the woman he had broken.

‎It was the least he could do.

‎It was nowhere near enough.

‎Below the city glittered on, beautiful and merciless, keeping everyone’s secrets equally.

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