Continuation…
The room they took me to was smaller than I expected, with a single table, two plastic chairs, and a fluorescent light that flickered every few seconds like it was struggling to stay alive, much like I was.
The officer who had spoken to me at the compound sat across from me, a folder open in front of him, papers I could not read from where I sat but could feel, somehow, contained my entire life inside them.
“Mrs. Zainab Abubakar,” he began, reading my full married name off a document, “you are the elder sister of Aliyu Mohammed, currently under investigation for internet fraud and conspiracy involving international victims across three countries.”
I said nothing. My hands were folded tightly in my lap to keep them from shaking visibly.
“We have transaction records,” he continued, “showing multiple transfers from an account linked to your brother into your personal account and your husband’s joint account with you, over a period of approximately two years. Rent payments. Construction costs for a boys’ quarters. Hospital deposits. Can you confirm these transfers took place?”
I thought, briefly, foolishly, about lying. About saying I did not know where Aliyu’s money came from, that I had simply assumed he was doing well in his transport business, the cover story he had always used with people outside the family.
But I thought of Musa’s face. Of the way he had warned me, calmly, patiently, for almost two years, never once raising his voice, simply laying the truth out in front of me the way he laid out numbers in his ledgers, clean and undeniable.
I thought about the officer’s own words to me that night, though he had not said them yet, I somehow already knew what kind of man was sitting across from me.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “I confirm it.”
“And did you know, at the time you received these transfers, the source of your brother’s income?”
This was the question that mattered. This was the question that could either end with me walking out of that building that same night, or end with my name attached permanently to a case file beside my brother’s.
I closed my eyes briefly.
“I suspected,” I said finally. “I did not ask directly. But yes. I suspected, and I chose not to confirm it, because confirming it would have meant I had to stop accepting the help.”
The officer looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable passing behind his eyes, before he wrote something down and slid a single sheet of paper across the table toward me.
“This is a statement,” he said. “I need you to read it, and if it’s accurate, sign it. Cooperation matters greatly in cases like this, Mrs. Abubakar. The people who lie to us tend to find themselves treated very differently from the people who tell the truth, even an uncomfortable truth.”
I read the statement slowly. It documented exactly what I had said, no more, no less. My knowledge, my suspicion, my choice not to confirm it directly. It did not accuse me of participating in the fraud itself. It simply confirmed that I had been a beneficiary who had chosen convenient ignorance over inconvenient truth.
I signed it with a hand that would not stop trembling.
“You’re free to go tonight,” the officer said, closing the folder. “But I need you to understand something clearly before you leave this room.”
I looked up at him.
“Being family does not automatically mean being guilty,” he said, “but it also does not automatically mean being innocent. The law looks at what you did with what you knew, not simply what blood runs through your veins. Tonight, your statement helps you. But your brother’s case is far from finished, and depending on what continues to surface, you may be called upon again.”
I walked out of that station into the cool night air, my legs weak beneath me, and found Musa waiting exactly where I had left him hours earlier, sitting silently in his car outside the gate, having refused to go home without me despite everyone telling him it could be a long night.
He did not say “I told you so.”
He simply opened the passenger door, waited until I was seated, and reached over to hold my hand, tightly, the way he used to hold it in the very first months of our marriage, before Aliyu’s money had slowly, quietly, begun to change the shape of everything between us.
“Is it over?” I asked him, my voice barely above a whisper.
Musa was quiet for a long moment before he answered, and his answer, when it finally came, was not the reassurance I was desperate to hear.
“For you, tonight, yes. For your brother,” he said, starting the car slowly, “I don’t think this is anywhere close to over.”
Three weeks later, we finally received word of exactly where Aliyu was being held, and when I stood in that visiting room, staring at my brother through a thick pane of glass, thinner than I had ever seen him, his once-confident eyes now carrying something I can only describe as quiet defeat, he said something to me that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
Title: The Guy Man
#story #storytelling #storytherapist
© Rayowrites
