EPISODE 2
After that hospital night, something between Aliyu and me changed permanently, though neither of us said it out loud.
He started calling me more often. Not the guarded, occasional calls we used to have as siblings who loved each other but lived separate lives. Real calls. Long ones. He would ask about my salary, about whether the school was still owing me, about whether I had started saving for the small piece of land I always talked about buying one day near Mama’s compound.
And slowly, without any grand announcement, the money started coming.
Small things at first. Data for my phone. “Something small” for fuel when my old Corolla started giving me trouble. Then it became bigger. He cleared six months of rent for my flat in one transfer and simply said, “Face your work. Stop stressing yourself over landlord wahala.”
I told myself I was only accepting help from my brother. That was all. Nothing more complicated than that. Family helps family; that was how I had been raised, that was the only explanation I allowed myself to hold onto.
My husband, Musa, did not see it the same way.
Musa and I had been married for almost two years at that point, and from the very beginning, he had never fully trusted the source of Aliyu’s sudden wealth. He was a quiet man, an accountant by profession, someone who dealt in numbers and receipts and things that could be explained on paper. Aliyu’s money could not be explained on any paper Musa had ever seen.
One night, after I came home excited, telling him Aliyu wanted to help us complete the boys’ quarters behind our house, Musa put down the newspaper he was reading, looked at me for a long moment, and said something I brushed aside far too quickly.
“Zainab, I need you to listen to me carefully, and I need you to actually hear what I’m saying, not just wait for me to finish talking so you can defend your brother.”
I folded my arms, already irritated, already anticipating another one of his lectures about Aliyu.
“You work for the state ministry of education,” he continued. “I work for a registered accounting firm. Our names, our salaries, our tax records, everything about us is documented, traceable, clean. The day your brother’s business scatters, and things like this always scatter eventually, do you understand what will happen to people who have been quietly benefiting from him?”
“He’s my brother, Musa. Am I supposed to watch Baba die because I’m too proud to collect help?”
“I’m not talking about the hospital,” he said, his voice suddenly sharper than I had ever heard it. “That was different. That was an emergency, and even that, I understood, even though it troubled me. I’m talking about this. Boys’ quarters. Data. Rent. Land. You are slowly building a whole life on money that has no history, Zainab, and money that has no history always, always comes back one day to ask questions.”
I did not want to hear it.
I told him he was being dramatic, that Aliyu had people who “handled things properly,” that his business was structured, registered, legitimate on paper even if we all quietly knew what fueled it underneath. I told him plenty of big men in this country had built empires on far worse and nobody ever came to disturb them.
Musa looked at me with something between pity and fear, and said only one more thing before he picked his newspaper back up.
“You are not just his sister anymore. The way this thing is going, you are becoming his shadow. And shadows disappear the moment the sun that casts them goes down.”
I did not sleep well that night, but not because I believed him.
I told myself I didn’t sleep well because he had annoyed me.
Looking back now, I know that wasn’t the truth. Some part of me, deep down, in the same place where guilt and denial fight each other quietly, already knew Musa was right. I simply was not ready to face what that would mean, not for Aliyu, not for our family, and certainly not for the comfortable new version of my own life that his money had slowly, carefully, begun to build.
Three months later, at almost two in the morning, my phone rang.
It was Aliyu.
His voice, when I picked up, was not the confident, easy voice I had grown used to.
It was shaking.
“Zainab,” he said, “I need you to come to my house now. Please. Don’t tell anybody yet. Just come.”
I sat up in bed, my heart already pounding before I even understood why, Musa’s warning ringing suddenly, loudly, in my ears.
“Aliyu, what’s wrong? Talk to me.”
There was a long silence on the line, the kind of silence that carries bad news inside it before a single word is spoken.
Then he said the sentence that would mark the exact moment everything in our family began to unravel.
“They caught one of the boys I work with. He knows my name.”
Title: The Guy Man
#story #storytelling #storytherapist
© Rayowrites
