That evening Chairman Folarin came to the flat, accompanied only by the lawyer who had advised him to stay away. He stood in the narrow sitting room beneath a ceiling fan that clicked once during each turn, and for the first time Nkiru saw the distance between the life he controlled and the life his choices had damaged. Tobi was seated on the sofa with the original negative report and the new positive result on the table before him. He had arranged the papers carefully, not because he expected them to explain the past but because he wanted Folarin to look at them while answering. There would be no more private conversations in which only the chairman knew what had happened.
"Did you change my DNA result?" Tobi asked.
Folarin looked at the two documents, then at his daughter-in-law's husband. "I did not alter the laboratory's primary record," he said.
"That isn't what I asked."
"Yes," Folarin admitted. "I authorized a false summary to be delivered to you."
Tobi pressed his hand against the table to steady himself. "You took eight years from me."
"I prevented several lives from collapsing," Folarin answered, and then seemed to hear how terrible the sentence sounded in that room. "I believed I was preventing it."
"No," Nkiru said. "You decided whose life was allowed to collapse."
The chairman did not deny that he had been afraid of scandal, but he struggled to understand why his fear made no difference to the two people facing him. He said he had protected Temi, her marriage, a child who would have been pulled between families, and business relationships on which many employees depended. Nkiru told him those interests had been real but not his to balance by issuing a fabricated report. An honest result would have forced painful choices, she said, but those choices belonged to the people living the lives. He had treated their futures as problems that could be settled by an executive order.
Tobi wanted to know who else had been involved. Folarin confirmed that an employee in the family office had prepared the misleading summary and that Kunle had eventually obtained copies of the real findings. He did not know at first how Kunle acquired them, but later recognized the document among materials Kunle used to pressure the family over financial matters. Folarin admitted he had not reported the blackmail because doing so would have exposed the original deception. He had believed he could keep the files hidden and remove the threat quietly, just as he had once believed he could close the question of Korede's paternity without anyone knowing the truth.
"Did my job at your company have anything to do with this?" Tobi asked.
The chairman hesitated. "Temi recommended you because she thought your qualifications were good and because she wanted to help you settle after the uncertainty."
"That isn't the whole answer," Nkiru said.
"No," Folarin admitted. "It isn't."