Too Much Lie To Be True

POV: Ada The room smelled like old paper and something I could not name. Maybe grief. Maybe obsession. I had been sitting in my father's home office for so long that the feeling had stopped feeling strange. It was past midnight. The rest of the house was quiet. My mother had gone to bed two hours ago, and I had waited until I heard her breathing slow through the thin wall before I crept in here. I always waited. She did not know how many nights I spent in this room. She would not have allowed it if she did. The walls were covered in papers. Notes in my father's handwriting, printed news articles, photos, emails he had kept as screenshots. He had started it before he died. I had been adding to it for eighteen months. We called it the wall of secrets, he and I, back when there was still a he and I. Back before the road and the rain and the car that went off the bridge. Tonight I was reading the last article he never finished. It was about the Mensah Media Group, one of the most powerful media companies in Nigeria. My father believed they had been doing terrible things for years. Making up false news to ruin people's careers on purpose. Hiding evidence of a government crime big enough that people had gone to prison for things they never did. He had spent three years gathering proof. He died before he could publish a single word of it. I had read this article so many times I could recite it from memory. Every paragraph. Every sentence. But tonight I did something different. I went through the folder underneath it, slowly, page by page, and that was when I found it. A small handwritten note tucked inside the back flap. I recognised the handwriting before I even read the words. My father's. Quick and slanted, like he was always in a hurry to get the thought down before it escaped. He used to say that thoughts were like fish, you had to catch them fast or they were gone. "Source inside Mensah. Meeting set. 3 days." And below that, a date. I had to count twice to make sure. Three days after that date, my father's car went off the bridge in the rain. "He was three days away," I said out loud to the empty room. My voice came out smaller than I expected. "Three days away from everything." I sat with that for a long time. Long enough for the house to settle around me, the small creaks of old wood, the sound of a car passing outside, the tick of the clock my father had kept on his desk even after it stopped keeping correct time because he said a stopped clock was still right twice a day and that was good enough odds for him. I used to roll my eyes when he said that. I would give a lot to be able to roll my eyes at him now. Then I opened my laptop. The email was already in my inbox. I had read it twenty-three times. I know because I counted. It was an acceptance letter from the Mensah Media Academy, an elite journalism school built and funded by the Mensah family. Only top students got in. The waiting list ran into the hundreds every year. I had not applied as myself. I used my mother's maiden name. Ada Eze. A school photo from two years ago when my hair was shorter and I looked less like someone carrying a war inside her chest. A fake backstory I had been building quietly for four months, adding small details, making it breathe and feel real. Getting in was the easy part. I was a good student. I had always been a good student because my father said a sharp mind was the only thing no one could take from you. I had held onto that like it was the last thing he gave me. Because it was. I printed the acceptance letter and pinned it to the wall of secrets. It sat right below his photo. He was laughing in the photo, holding his recorder at a press event, surrounded by people who had no idea what he knew. "Dad," I said quietly. "I am going to finish it. I promise you." In the morning I told my mother I had been accepted to a journalism program. I showed her the letter but kept my thumb over the school name. She hugged me so hard I felt her heartbeat against my shoulder. She said your father would be so proud. She cried a little. I held her and smiled and tried not to think about how many lies were stacked inside that one small smile. On my way to school I called Femi. He picked up on the second ring, which meant he was already awake and already working on something, because Femi did not sleep like a normal person. "I am going in Monday," I told him. "I need you on the outside. Anything that comes out of their servers, I need to see it." "Done," he said. Then a pause. "Ada. Be careful." "I'm always careful." "That," he said, "is exactly what worries me." That night I stood in front of the wall one last time before Monday. I looked at every paper, every photo, every thread I had pulled and pinned and pulled again. I had found three things that did not match the official accident report. I had found a Mensah Media document timestamped the night my father died. And I had found a name written in my father's notes that I had never been able to track down. Just a letter. Contact: T. I circled it. The pen tore slightly through the paper. I had circled it so many times the page was wearing thin. "I am going to find out who you are," I said to the letter T. "And I am going to find out what you know." Then I turned off the light and stood in the dark for a moment, the way I always did before leaving this room. Like the dark was something I owed him. Like standing in it was the closest thing I had to keeping him company. I was walking into a school full of people who might have helped cause my father's death. I had four months to find the truth inside their walls. I had one rule I had written for myself in the front of my notebook, underlined twice, in the darkest ink I had. Do not feel anything real. Do not let anyone in. Do not forget what you are there for. I had no idea how fast that rule was going to break. But I would find out on the very first day.