Borrowed Light, Episode 5: Is She Asleep?
Ada answers K. as Tobe. What she reads in that chat changes everything she thought she knew about the one man she trusted.
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Previously: The man behind the frosted glass was Kolawole Adebayo, Sikirat's husband, the same banker who turned Ada's mother away in 2019. K. threatened her mother's shop. Then Temi called at midnight: Tobe has been working for Kolawole since June. And on Tobe's laptop, a chat window opened by itself.
Yaba, 11:52 PM
K.: Is she asleep?
The cursor blinked under the message.
Ada's hands hovered above the keyboard. Her heart was so loud she was sure the man on the other side of the screen could hear it.
She typed.
Tobe: Yes.
Three dots. Then:
K.: Good boy. Thursday night, 11 PM. You send the master keys to the address I gave you. All of them. Server, bank API, the backup. After Friday she will not need them.
K.: Remember Enugu. Remember your mother's house.
The window went quiet.
Ada scrolled up.
She should not have. She did it anyway. The chat went back to June. Eleven weeks of messages.
A photo of a cream bungalow with a mango tree in the yard. A scanned letter on Crestline Bank letterhead. NOTICE OF FORECLOSURE. Mrs Ifeoma Eze.
Then, one week later, from K.:
The letter can disappear. Everything can disappear. I only need small help from you. A username. A password. Nobody gets hurt.
And Tobe's reply, sent at 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in June:
Okay.
Ada closed the laptop very gently, the way you close a door on a sleeping baby.
Then she sat on the floor of her room and did not cry, because she was too tired to cry, and waited for morning.
7:02 AM
Tobe knocked twice, like always.
He came in holding two cups of Lipton and a nylon of hot agege bread, like always. He was talking before the door shut. "I didn't sleep, I think if we trace the eleven transfers through the..."
He saw her face. Then he saw the laptop, open on the table, facing him.
The bread slid out of his hand onto the floor.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
"Enugu," Ada said finally.
Tobe sat down on the plastic chair as if his legs had been cut.
"My father built that house," he said. His voice was flat. "Twenty-two years as a lecturer. Every kobo. When he died, my mother took a small loan against it for my sister's school fees. Small. Then the interest. Then the penalties. Then one day, a letter. Ninety days." He looked at the floor. "And then a man called me. Very polite. Prayer beads. He said he could make it go away."
"You gave him my company."
"I gave him a password!" His voice broke. "One password. He said it was just to look. Just to watch. I told myself, he will look, he will see nothing, he will go. And every day I watched the logs and he did nothing and I thought, okay, maybe it is just a rich man's game. Then you pitched, and he made k.admin, and I..."
"You lied to my face. In this room."
"Yes."
"You let my mother's friends lose their money."
"I didn't know about the money. I swear on my father's grave, Ada. I did not know about the transfer."
She believed him. That was the worst part. She believed him, and it did not help at all.
The kettle in the corridor whistled. Somebody's radio played the morning news in Yoruba.
Ada picked up the bread from the floor, dusted it, and put it on the table.
"Thursday night," she said. "Eleven PM. He wants the master keys."
Tobe looked up.
"So give them to him," Ada said.
"What?"
"Give him keys. Not the real ones. Build him a door, Tobenna. A beautiful fake Kolo that looks exactly like the real one. And when he walks through it, I want to know his IP address, his device, his location, every click. Everything." She leaned forward. "You opened the gate for him. Now you build the trap."
For a long moment Tobe just stared at her.
Then, for the first time in three days, something came back into his eyes.
"A honeypot," he said quietly. "I can do that by Thursday."
"Then do it."
"Ada. If he finds out..."
"Then your mother loses her house," she said. "And mine loses her shop. Same as if we do nothing. At least this way, we choose."
Harbour Capital, by phone, 2:15 PM
Mrs Adeyemi-Cole did not say hello.
"I hear your money walked," she said.
Ada closed her eyes. Of course she knew. Lagos was not a city. It was a whisper with traffic.
"Somebody stole from my traders," Ada said. "I'm handling it."
"Are you." It was not a question. "Friday, 5 PM, Miss Okafor. Nothing has changed. I will be in my boardroom. You will bring me a signed term sheet and a clean company. Or you will bring me the truth, all of it, with proof." A pause. "What you will not bring me is excuses. If you bring me excuses, I will still invest. But I will take enough of your company that you will work for me for the rest of your life."
"Why do you care so much about the truth?"
A small, strange silence on the line.
"Because I have been waiting a very long time for somebody to bring it to me," Mrs Adeyemi-Cole said. And she hung up.
Thursday, Balogun Market, 12:10 PM
Ada had not slept properly in three days. She went to the market because she needed to see her mother's face. Just for five minutes. Just to know one thing in her life was still where she left it.
The shutter was down.
Not half down. Fully down. Padlocked.
At noon. On a Thursday. In twenty-seven years, Mama Ngozi had never closed at noon on a Thursday, not even the week Ada's father died.
"Mama Bisi!" Ada ran three lines down to the pepper stall. "Where is my mother?"
Mama Bisi wiped her hands slowly on her wrapper. Her face was careful.
"She left around ten," she said. "A black jeep came. A driver in a black cap. She was not dragged, Ada. She walked. She was wearing her blue lace. Her best one." She hesitated. "She took the book."
"What book?"
"The blue one. Sikirat's book."
Ada dialled her mother. Switched off.
Again. Switched off.
She was standing in the middle of the walkway, in the noise and the heat, with wheelbarrows pushing past her and somebody shouting prices for Holland wax, when her phone finally rang.
Mummy.
She almost dropped it answering.
"Mummy! Where are you?"
But it was not her mother's voice.
It was a man's. Older. Slow. The kind of voice that had never once in its life needed to shout.
"Good afternoon, Miss Okafor," Kolawole Adebayo said. "Your mother is having tea with me. She takes it with two sugars. Did you know that?"
Ada could not breathe.
"Old Ikoyi. I will send the address. Come alone." A soft, pleasant pause. "And bring Tobenna's laptop. I believe you have been reading my messages."
To be continued in Episode 6.