Chapter 4

# Chapter 4

I have a friend called Sade.

Not a close friend—not the kind you call when you're crying at two in the morning, not the kind who knows the names of your childhood pets or the precise shade of shame you carry from that thing you did at twenty-three that you've never told your husband. Sade is what I'd call a strategic friend. The kind you keep because she is useful and interesting and operates in a world adjacent to your own—close enough to understand, far enough to be discreet.

Sade works in forensic accounting. She traces money for a living—through shell companies and offshore trusts and the kinds of financial architectures that men build when they want their wealth to be visible but its origins to be opaque. She once told me, over wine at a birthday party I didn't want to attend, that every fortune tells a story, and that most of those stories are about what someone is willing to sacrifice to keep the money moving in the right direction. I'd found this mildly interesting at the time. Now I found it essential.

I called her on a Thursday. Dele was at work. Nneka was at school. Tobias had left early for football practice, leaving his cereal bowl in the sink with the spoon still in it, a domestic transgression so routine it had become almost comforting. I sat in the car in the Sainsbury's car park—not because I needed to be there, but because the car was the one space where I felt genuinely unobserved. Our house had begun to feel compromised. Not by the note-writer, whose intrusions had paused—no new notes in over a week—but by my own awareness of its architecture. Every drawer was a potential hiding place. Every surface might conceal something I'd missed. The house had become a text I was reading too closely, finding meaning in every crack and shadow.

"Adunni," Sade said, her voice warm and faintly surprised. We hadn't spoken in months. "How are you? How are the children?"

"Fine. Everyone's fine. Sade, I need to ask you something, and I need you to not ask me why."

A pause. The kind of pause that tells you a person is recalibrating—shifting from social mode to professional mode, from wine-at-parties to depositions-and-documents.

"Go on."

"If I had a bank account number—just the last four digits—and I knew which bank it was with, and I knew the country, could you find out who owns it?"

"Depends on the country."

"Nigeria."

Another pause. "That's harder. Nigerian banking regulations are—well, they're regulations in the sense that they exist on paper. In practice, things are more flexible. But with enough context, yes, probably. Are we talking about a personal account or corporate?"

"Personal, I think. Monthly transfers. Consistent amounts."

"From?"

"From someone I know. To someone I don't."

Sade was quiet for a long time. I could hear her breathing. Could hear, faintly, the sound of a keyboard—she was already thinking, already working, the way people do when a problem engages the part of their brain that cannot be switched off.

"Adunni. Is this about Dele?"

I said nothing.

"Because if it is—and I'm not asking you to confirm—there are things you should know before you start pulling at threads like this. Financial investigations have a way of producing information you didn't ask for. You go looking for one thing and you find five others, and not all of them are things you can unfind."

"I understand that."

"Do you? Because I've had clients—women, mostly, though not always—who come to me wanting to know about a single transaction and end up with a dossier that dismantles their entire understanding of their marriage. And some of them wish they'd never asked."

"And the others?"

"The others are grateful. But gratitude and happiness are not the same thing."

I watched a woman cross the car park with a trolley full of shopping bags, a toddler balanced on her hip, her phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder. She was laughing at something. The normality of it—the uncomplicated, sunlit normality—made my chest ache with a feeling I couldn't name.

"I'm not looking for happiness," I said. "I'm looking for information."

Sade exhaled. "Send me what you have. The account digits, the bank if you know it, the approximate dates and amounts. Use the encrypted email I'll text you. And Adunni—don't tell anyone else you're doing this. Not a friend, not your mother, not a therapist. The fewer people who know, the fewer variables you have to manage."

"I know how to keep a secret."

She laughed at that—a short, involuntary sound. "Yes," she said. "I imagine you do."

---

I sent the information that evening, from the Sainsbury's car park again, using a new email address I'd created on a browser I'd downloaded specifically for this purpose, which I kept inside a folder on my phone labeled *Recipes*. The theatricality of it embarrassed me. I felt like a character in one of those airport thrillers Dele reads on long flights—the ones with embossed titles and a woman's silhouette on the cover, running from something or toward something, the reader never quite sure which.

But embarrassment is a luxury. Like hysteria. Like trust.

While I waited for Sade's response, I did my own research. The address on the envelopes—the one I didn't recognize, the one that was neither our home nor Dele's office nor his mother's apartment in Ikoyi—turned out to be a PO box. A physical mailing address attached to a post office in Yaba, on the Lagos Mainland. This told me almost nothing. PO boxes are anonymous by design; they exist precisely so that correspondence can be received without revealing a residential address. Dele knew this. Of course he did. He was a litigation specialist. He understood paper trails the way a surgeon understands anatomy—not just how they work, but how they fail.

But the postmarks were more revealing. I'd photographed every envelope. The stamps were Nigerian, ordinary, but the cancellation marks varied. Three letters had been posted from Mushin. Two from Yaba. One from Ikeja. And the last—the most recent, dated eighteen months ago—from a place I had to look up: Epe. A town on the eastern edge of Lagos, bordering the lagoon, known for its fish market and its relative quiet. Not the sort of place Dele had ever mentioned. Not the sort of place that appeared on his itineraries or in his anecdotes about Lagos traffic and client dinners and the particular exhaustion of doing business in a city that never stops moving.

Epe. I wrote it down in the period-tracker app and stared at the word and tried to understand what it meant that the geography of Dele's secret life was expanding even as I mapped it. Mushin, Yaba, Ikeja, Epe. These were not the Lagos neighborhoods of his official life—Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Lekki. These were elsewhere. Lower. Older. The kind of places his mother would describe, with the delicate distaste of a woman who had spent decades climbing, as *that side*.

What was Dele doing on *that side*?

---

The fourth note arrived three days later, and it changed everything.

I found it in Tobias's schoolbag.

Not in my coat, not beneath the fruit bowl, not in a shopping bag. In my son's rucksack, tucked into the front pocket where he kept his bus pass and a packet of chewing gum he thought I didn't know about. He'd come home from school, dropped the bag in the hallway as he always did—a crumpled heap of canvas and unfinished homework—and gone straight to the kitchen for toast. I picked it up to hang it on its hook. The pocket was unzipped. The paper was visible.

*She has three children. The eldest is twelve. His name is Adewale. He looks like your son.*

I read it standing in the hallway. Read it again. Folded it and put it in my pocket and hung up the rucksack and went to the kitchen and asked Tobias about his day and listened to him talk about a supply teacher who didn't know how to work the projector, and I smiled and nodded and made all the right sounds, and inside I was falling through a floor that had been solid five minutes ago.

Three children. Twelve years old. He looks like your son.

Twelve years. If the eldest was twelve, that meant—I did the math with the same flat precision I'd applied to the bank statements—he was born the year Nneka started primary school. The year Dele got his partnership. The year we'd renovated the kitchen and I'd chosen the copper pans and he'd said, laughing, that I had expensive taste and I'd said, not laughing, that I had *good* taste and there was a difference, and we'd kissed over the tile samples and I'd thought: this is what happiness looks like. This exact configuration. This kitchen. This man. This life.

That same year, in a compound in Mushin, a boy named Adewale was being born. Dele's son. A child with my husband's blood who had been alive for twelve years while I braided my daughter's hair and packed my son's lunch and slept beside their father in a bed he returned to after— what? Visiting? Providing? Being a different version of himself in a different house with a different woman?

I sat at the kitchen table after Tobias went upstairs. The house was quiet. The copper pans gleamed on their rack, faithful as sentinels, and I hated them suddenly—hated their beauty, their permanence, the way they hung there like evidence of a life well-made when the foundation beneath them was riddled with passages I'd never been shown.

Three children.

I thought about what Sade had said. *You go looking for one thing and you find five others.* I'd gone looking for a bank account and found a family. Not a woman. Not an affair—an affair is temporary, recreational, a detour from the main road that eventually curves back to where you started. This was a parallel road. Running alongside mine for over a decade, invisible only because I'd never looked sideways.

And the note-writer knew. Knew about the children, their ages, the boy's name. Knew enough to put this information not in my pocket or my shopping bag but in my *son's* schoolbag—a violation so intimate it made my skin contract. Whoever was doing this had access to my family. Not just to me. To us.

For the first time since the notes began, I felt something I recognized as fear.

---

Dele came home late that night. Nine o'clock, his tie loosened, his eyes carrying the particular fatigue of a man who has spent the day performing certainty for the benefit of others. He ate the dinner I'd left covered on the stove—rice and stew, the kind of meal that waits without deteriorating, the kind of meal a wife makes when she doesn't know what time her husband will return and has stopped asking.

I watched him eat. He sat at the kitchen counter, fork in one hand, phone in the other, scrolling through something—emails, probably, the endless correspondence of a man whose work follows him home like a loyal, tireless dog. He didn't look up. Didn't notice me watching from the doorway, didn't register the quality of my attention, which had shifted again—from clinical observation to something rawer, something that sat in my throat like an unswallowed stone.

Three children. The eldest is twelve.

I wanted to cross the room and take his face between my hands and say: *Tell me. Tell me everything. Tell me about Yemi and the compound and the money and the boy who looks like Tobias and the two other children whose names I don't know yet but will, I promise you, I will.* I wanted to give him the chance to confess, to explain, to offer some version of the story that would make the architecture of his deception comprehensible if not forgivable. I wanted to hear him say my name—my actual name, not the clipped initial he used in his letters to another woman—and tell me what I was to him, what I had been to him, whether any of it was real or whether our entire marriage was a performance staged for an audience of one.

I did not cross the room.

Instead, I said: "How was your day?"

"Long." He put his fork down. Rubbed his eyes. "The restructuring is dragging on. Graham wants to take it to tribunal, which would be a disaster for everyone."

"Sounds exhausting."

"It is." He looked at me then—really looked, the way he used to look at me when we were young, before children and mortgages and the slow accretion of years turned looking into something you did out of habit rather than desire. "Are you alright? You seem—I don't know. Somewhere else."

"I'm here," I said.

"Are you?"

The question hung between us. He held my gaze and I held his and for a moment—a single, suspended moment—I thought he was going to tell me. I thought the weight of his secret was pressing against the inside of his chest the way mine was pressing against the inside of mine, and that we were both standing at the edge of the same cliff, and that one of us was about to step off.

He smiled. "You work too hard," he said. "You should take a day for yourself. Go to that spa in Peckham you like."

"Maybe," I said.

He rinsed his plate. Kissed my temple. Went upstairs.

I stood in the kitchen alone and listened to his footsteps on the stairs, the creak of the bathroom door, the rush of water through pipes. The sounds of a house at night. The sounds of a marriage that was still, technically, in progress—still performing its nightly rituals, still going through its motions, a machine that continued to run even as its operator realized, with increasing clarity, that she had never understood its engine.

I took the note from my pocket and read it one more time.

*She has three children. The eldest is twelve. His name is Adewale. He looks like your son.*

Then I opened the period-tracker app and typed two words beneath the other notes I'd recorded:

*Find Yemi.*

It was no longer enough to trace the money. It was no longer enough to study the architecture from a distance, assembling the blueprint from photographs and bank statements and seven-year-old text messages on a dead man's phone. I needed to see her. To stand in front of the woman who had shared my husband for twelve years—longer, perhaps—and look at her face and understand who she was and what she knew and whether the life she'd built with Dele was a mirror of mine or its negative, the shadow-image that exists only because the original stands in the light.

I would find her. In Mushin or Epe or wherever the geography of Dele's other life had carried her. I would find her and I would see the children—his children, my children's half-siblings, the family I'd been funding with my ignorance—and I would know.

Not everything. You never know everything. But enough. Enough to stop falling. Enough to feel the ground again beneath my feet, even if the ground turned out to be somewhere I'd never stood before.

I turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs and got into bed beside my husband and lay in the dark and listened to him breathe and thought: *Adewale.* Twelve years old. The same age Tobias was when he first beat Dele at chess and Dele had laughed with such unguarded pride that I'd taken a photograph of his face—the joy in it, the sheer paternal delight—and kept it on my phone's home screen for months.

Had Dele laughed like that for Adewale? Had he sat across from another boy—his boy, his other boy—and felt that same uncomplicated rush of love? And if so, what did that make the love he showed our children? Was it halved? Diluted? Or was it possible—and this was the thought I could not look at directly, the way you cannot look at the sun—that love could be doubled without diminishing? That a man could hold two families in his heart the way you hold two truths, each one complete, each one real, neither one a lie?

I didn't know. I didn't know anything yet. But the not-knowing had a texture now, a shape. It was no longer the formless dread of the first note, the vague unease of *I know what you did last September.* It was specific. It had a name, an age, an address. It had a face I hadn't seen but could already imagine—a boy who looked like my son, standing in a compound with a green gate, looking up at a camera held by a man who loved him in secret.

Sleep came slowly. When it did, I dreamed of houses. Two of them, standing side by side on a road I didn't recognize, identical in every detail except the color of the gate. One green. One blue. And in each doorway, a woman stood watching the other, and neither of them moved, and neither of them spoke, and the road between them was very long and very narrow and paved with all the things a man carries when he walks between two lives and calls it love.