Tobi had met Nkiru two years afterward, at a friend's wedding where she handled a seating dispute with such patient confidence that he asked her how she managed difficult people. She told him it helped not to begin by assuming they were difficult; sometimes they were simply frightened. They had talked that evening until the music stopped, and he had gone home feeling that a door he thought permanently closed might have opened again. He told her he had been in a serious relationship, but not with whom, and she never asked for a list of names from his past. Their marriage began with vows they believed were complete.
Now Temi turned toward him and spoke with visible impatience. "If you keep pretending we were ordinary colleagues, every explanation you offer about the payment sounds worse."
"We were finished before I met Nkiru."
"We were engaged, Tobi. Four years together, families involved, a wedding discussed. And you never told your wife?"
"Because there was nothing between us anymore."
Temi laughed without warmth. "If there was nothing to hide, why do you look as though she might leave you when she hears it?"
He did not answer. He knew that in the office he had accepted an unauthorized shortcut from someone he trusted for reasons that had nothing to do with procurement. He had spent years describing the fraud case as a story of being wronged, and that was true in one essential respect: he had not stolen forty-two million naira. But the version he gave his wife omitted the decisions that placed him in danger. He had confused his innocence of theft with innocence of every choice leading to it.
When he finally told Nkiru about the engagement, she listened without moving from the kitchen doorway. She asked whether he had worked for Temi before joining the Akinwale Group and whether her recommendation had helped him secure the position. He answered yes to both, each admission delivered as though the next might be easier. She asked if Temi had been aware he was married when she requested the unauthorized approval. Again he answered yes.
"And in five years of marriage," Nkiru said, "you never found one evening to mention that the woman who recommended you for the job was once your fiancée."
"It ended two years before I met you. I didn't want to keep that part of my life between us."
"You kept it between us every day you chose not to tell me."
"I made a professional mistake. I didn't steal."
"You made a marital decision as well. You decided I didn't need to know what made you trust her."
Nkiru left the kitchen before her anger could turn the conversation into words neither could take back. In the bedroom she sat on the edge of the mattress, listening to Tobi moving uncertainly beyond the door. She thought of the nights she had held him while he insisted people were destroying his