Continuation…
I did not touch the bag.
I want to be honest about that, because in the version of this story people would later tell in the village, some of them made it sound like I ran home that night clutching evidence, like a woman fully committed to protecting her brother at any cost. That is not what happened.
What happened is that I sat on that floor for almost twenty minutes in complete silence, staring at that black bag, while Aliyu watched me with the desperate eyes of a boy again, not the guy man, not the big spender, just my little brother, afraid, waiting for his elder sister to save him the way he had once saved our father.
And then I stood up.
“No,” I said. “I won’t take it.”
His face fell in a way that broke something in me even as I held my ground.
“Zainab—”
“Listen to me.” I knelt back down in front of him, taking his hands in mine, the way Mama used to hold our hands when she wanted us to really absorb what she was saying. “If I take that bag into my house, and they find it there, it is not just you that finishes, Aliyu. It’s Musa. It’s my job. It’s my name. It’s everything I have built that has nothing to do with this life you chose. I cannot protect you by destroying myself. That is not protection. That is just two people drowning instead of one.”
He pulled his hands away slowly, and for a moment I thought he would be angry, that he would remind me again of every naira he had ever sent me, every debt I supposedly owed him for two years of quiet, unquestioning help.
He didn’t.
Instead, he simply nodded, once, and said, “Then I need you to go home. Please. Before it’s light outside. And Zainab, whatever happens after tonight, promise me you’ll take care of Baba and Mama. Promise me you won’t let them fall apart if I’m not there to hold things together.”
I promised him, though my voice broke doing it, and I left that house before dawn feeling like I had aged ten years in a single night.
Two days passed with no news.
Aliyu did not answer his phone. His usual driver said he hadn’t been called in since the night I visited. Even Salisu’s arrest, which had been the source of so much fear, quietly disappeared from the local news cycle without any follow-up, the way these things sometimes do when the right amount of money changes the right hands early enough.
I began to hope, foolishly, that perhaps the danger had passed.
Musa did not share my optimism.
“Things like this don’t just disappear, Zainab,” he said quietly one evening, watching me pace our small sitting room for what felt like the hundredth time that week. “Silence before these things is often worse than noise. It usually means someone somewhere is building a case slowly, carefully, before they move.”
I did not want to hear it, but three days later, I understood exactly what he meant.
It was a Sunday evening. I remember because I had just returned from choir practice, still humming something under my breath, when I turned onto the road leading to our family compound and saw them from a distance.
Two black SUVs, parked directly outside our gate, the kind of vehicles that did not belong to anyone in our neighbourhood, engines still running, headlights cutting sharply through the evening dust.
My stomach dropped before I had even fully processed what I was seeing.
By the time I parked and stepped out, my legs were already shaking beneath me, my choir wrapper suddenly feeling far too thin for the cold spreading through my chest.
Men in plain clothes were standing in our compound, speaking quietly with Baba, who looked smaller and more fragile than I had ever seen him, his hands trembling slightly at his sides.
One of the men turned as I approached, his eyes moving over me with the kind of assessing calm that made my skin crawl.
“Are you Zainab?” he asked. “Aliyu’s sister?”
I could barely force the word out.
“Yes.”
“We need you to come with us,” he said. “We have some questions. About the boys’ quarters behind your house. About certain transfers. And about a hospital deposit made almost two years ago.”
Behind him, through the open compound gate, I could see Mama standing frozen by the kitchen door, one hand pressed against her mouth, and in that single, devastating moment, I understood with complete and terrible clarity that Musa had been right about everything, and that the sun that had cast my comfortable shadow for two years was finally, irreversibly, going down.
Title: The Guy Man
Episode 4
#story #storytelling #storytherapist
© Rayowrites
