When Nkiru left, she saw Tunde near the elevator. He asked whether Amina had given her new information and she said only that the investigation was continuing. He accepted the boundary, perhaps because he was finally learning that the family did not have a right to know everything simply because it had paid for the building. Then he told her the company would continue correcting employee records and reviewing complaints even after the media lost interest. Nkiru asked him to make sure those promises were measured by what happened to ordinary workers, not by how reassuring they sounded at board meetings.
A few days later Tobi invited Nkiru to attend another counseling session. She agreed, but not before telling him that he should not interpret her willingness to speak as a promise to return. He said he understood, and for the first time she believed he might mean it without waiting for her to reward the admission. They spoke about the possibility of a future that might include Korede in some careful, appropriate way, and about the more immediate problem of building trust between two adults who had learned to hide from conflict in different ways. They left the meeting with questions instead of answers, and Nkiru found that she could bear those questions better when nobody insisted on solving them for her.
That night her phone lit up while she was preparing for bed. The message came from another unfamiliar number and contained no greeting, only a brief notice that a file had been accessed again. She did not open the attachment. She forwarded the message through the channel Amina had provided and placed the phone face down on her bedside table. She refused to spend another night chasing an anonymous stranger through the ruins of a family's secrets.
Minutes later Amina called. Her voice was steady, but Nkiru heard an urgency beneath the careful questions about the latest message and when it had arrived. She confirmed the time and explained that she had not opened the file, exactly as they had agreed. Amina thanked her, then fell silent for a moment that made Nkiru sit up. When she spoke again, she said the team had encountered a problem in comparing the recent archive activity with the copies they had already secured.
"A problem?" Nkiru asked.
"Yes. I don't want to speculate before the verification is finished, but there is something we need to discuss in person."
Nkiru looked toward the closed bedroom door, at the flat where she had learned so many truths from people who were certain she could not survive them. She thought of the man at table twelve, of Ronke's cruel certainty, of Tobi and Temi standing before a paternity result neither could bring themselves to open. Then she thought of how much damage had followed every decision to keep a person in the dark. She reached for a pen, opened a fresh page in her notebook, and asked the only question she was willing to ask until the facts were ready.
"What is the problem?"