Too Much Lie To Be True

Two People With the Same Secret

POV: Ada

I did not sleep. I sat on my dormitory bed with my notebook open across my knees and split everything I knew into two columns. What I had found. What someone clearly did not want me to find. The two columns grew at almost the same rate, which told me something I did not like.

At six in the morning I called Femi.

"Someone cleaned the archive after me," I said. "They left a message on a blank sheet of paper. Someone inside this school knows I am looking."

Femi was quiet for a second. "Ada, if they wanted to stop you completely, they would have done more than leave a note. A note is a message. It means they are not sure yet what to do with you. They are watching to see how you respond."

"That is somehow worse."

"I know," he said. "But it also means you still have time. Use it."

I got dressed. I put on my face. I went to school.

During a free period, I took a wrong turn near the senior staff offices. It was not accidental. I had noticed something on the building plan that did not match the layout I had walked through, a corridor that appeared on the plan but that I had not found yet in person. I was looking for a second access point to the lower archive level.

I found something I had not planned for instead. An unlocked office door, slightly open, the kind of open that happens when someone leaves in a hurry and does not pull it fully shut. I did not go in. I stood in the corridor and read from the doorway, the way I had learned to read from a distance when I was twelve and used to sneak into my father's study.

There was a document spread open on the desk. At the top, in bold: OKONKWO INVESTIGATION, INTERNAL REVIEW. My father's name again. But the date on this document was from only four months ago. Not from the time of his death. Four months ago. While I was still at home in Port Harcourt building my cover story.

They had already been preparing. They had known someone might come looking even before I arrived.

I stepped back from the doorway. I walked away at a normal pace and did not change my breathing until I turned the corner.

My father's source was still out there somewhere. And the Mensah family knew it.

The academy rooftop had a small garden that not many students used. The angles were wrong for good footage up there, no clean backgrounds, no flattering light at the hours when people came to eat lunch. I went up there to think because it was the only place I had found in the school where I could not feel the cameras.

Tobias was already there.

He was sitting on a low bench with a plain paper notebook in his hands, an actual notebook, the kind that had nothing to do with school assignments. When he saw me he closed it, but not fast enough. I caught a glimpse of what was on the page. A column of names. A column of dates beside it.

We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"You come up here too," I said.

"It is the only place in the building without a camera," he said.

I sat on the far end of the bench. We were quiet for a minute. The city spread out below us, flat and wide and loud from this height.

"That notebook," I said. "That is not homework."

"No," he said.

"Are you investigating something?"

He looked out at the city below for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, like he was speaking to the skyline rather than to me, "I think my grandfather has been hurting people for a long time. I have been trying to understand how far it goes and how long it has been happening."

My heart beat once very hard. "How long have you known?"

"Long enough to know I cannot do it alone." He turned to look at me. "And long enough to know you are not a scholarship student."

The air between us shifted in a way I could feel but not name. I thought about lying. I thought about saying nothing. I thought about standing up and walking back downstairs and finding another way through this.

Instead I said: "My father was a journalist. He died eighteen months ago. I do not think it was an accident."

No one had heard me say that out loud except Femi. Not my mother. Not my aunt. Not anyone. The words felt strange in the air, real in a way they had never been when I was only thinking them.

Tobias went very still. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he opened his notebook to a page near the back and turned it so I could see.

At the top of the page, in his handwriting, was a name. A contact name. Two words.

Contact: T.

I stared at it. The same two words from my father's note. The same letter. The same format.

"T stands for Tobias," he said quietly. "I was the source your father was trying to meet."

The rooftop went silent around me. The city noise was still there, cars and wind and the distant sound of someone's music, but all of it fell back like it was happening somewhere far away.

"You were going to hand over evidence," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.

"Yes. But then he died. And I did not know if anyone else knew. I did not know if anyone was coming." He looked at me with an expression I had not seen on his face before. Not the calm performance of the cafeteria or the careful measuring look from the corridor. Something underneath all of that. "And then you arrived."

We sat on that rooftop in the school named after the man who might have stopped my father from ever reaching his meeting, and neither of us spoke for a long time. The fake relationship we had built to protect ourselves had just become something neither of us had planned for.

We were not pretending anymore. We were partners. And whatever came next, we were going to have to face it together.