Continuation…
I did not remember getting dressed. I did not remember the drive.
The next clear memory I have is standing in Aliyu’s sitting room at almost three in the morning, the ceiling fan turning lazily above us, doing nothing against the heat that seemed to be coming from inside my own chest rather than the weather outside.
Aliyu was sitting on the floor.
Not on the leather sofas he had imported all the way from Kano, the ones he was always so proud to show visitors. On the bare floor, his back against the base of the sofa, laptops and hard drives and phones stacked around him like a man preparing for a war he already knew he could not win.
His eyes were red. Not from crying, I don’t think, but from something closer to exhaustion, the kind that comes from staring at the same catastrophe for hours without blinking.
“Aliyu.” I lowered myself carefully to the floor beside him, my church wrapper still tied hastily over the nightdress I’d left the house in. “Talk to me properly. From the beginning.”
He rubbed his face with both hands before he spoke.
“There are five of us. Well, five that matter. We don’t work in the same location, we don’t even always work the same targets, but the software, the documents, the offshore accounts, all of it runs through one system. One of the boys, Salisu, he handles the West African clients, the older widows, the retirees. Yesterday, EFCC picked him up in Kaduna.”
My stomach dropped.
“Does he know your name?”
Aliyu did not answer immediately, and in that hesitation, I felt something cold move slowly through my body.
“Aliyu.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. “Does. He. Know. Your. Name?”
He finally lifted his head and looked at me directly.
“He knows everybody’s name, Zainab. That’s how the system works. We’re not strangers to each other. We built this together, we trust each other, that trust is the whole foundation of how the money moves smoothly between us.”
I sat there, absorbing that, feeling the full weight of every warning Musa had ever given me arrive at once, all at the same time, like debts finally being called in.
“What happens now?” I asked, though some part of me already dreaded the answer.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, and for the first time since he had become “the guy man,” since he had become the version of himself that bought Camrys and tiled kitchens and cleared rent for his siblings without complaint, I saw genuine fear in my brother’s face. Not performance. Not the confident swagger he wore like a second skin now. Real fear.
“My lawyer says if they haven’t come for me by tomorrow evening, it likely means Salisu hasn’t given them my name yet, or the network isn’t fully mapped out on their end. But if they do come…” He trailed off, staring at the black bag sitting beside him on the floor, the one I hadn’t noticed until that moment.
“If they do come, what?”
He picked up the bag slowly and placed it in front of me.
“I need you to hold this for me.”
I stared at the bag like it might bite me.
“Hold what, Aliyu? What exactly is inside there?”
“Documents. Account details. A hard drive with client records. Nothing that directly implicates you if it’s just sitting in your house, but if it stays here and they raid this place, it’s finished for me. Completely finished. No lawyer will be able to help me after that.”
“You want to turn me into a criminal? Me? A civil servant, Aliyu? My husband works for a licensed accounting firm. Do you understand what you’re asking me to do?”
He looked at me, and something in his expression shifted from fear into something quieter, something almost accusing.
“You’ve been collecting from this same money for two years, Zainab. The rent. The boys’ quarters. Baba’s hospital bill that saved his life. You’ve been eating from this table since the very beginning. The only thing that’s changed tonight is that now, for the first time, the table is shaking.”
I had no response to that.
Because he was not wrong, and both of us knew it.
I sat there in the heavy silence of that sitting room, staring at a bag that could either protect my brother or destroy the careful, respectable life Musa and I had spent years building, and for the first time since this whole nightmare had walked into my house, I understood with total clarity that Musa’s warning had never really been about Aliyu.
It had been about me.
About the exact moment I would be forced to choose between the sister who loved her brother unconditionally, and the woman who had quietly built a comfortable life on money she had chosen, deliberately, not to ask enough questions about.
I looked at the bag one more time.
Then I looked at my brother’s face, waiting, desperate, and I made a decision that night that I would spend the rest of my life either being grateful for, or regretting completely.
Title: The Guy Man
Episode: 3
#story #storytelling #storytherapist
© Rayowrites
