FOR C

Mandy

“Your nice somebody came,” Dad said on Sunday evening, before I’d even sat down.

I froze with my bag halfway onto the chair that tilts to the left.

“Who?”

“Oluwadamilare.” He pronounced every syllable with great care, like a man who had been practising. “Tall. Serious. He brought groundnuts.”

He pointed at the bedside table. A paper bag, half empty, shells in a neat pile beside it.

“He came here?”

“This morning. He sat in that chair.” Dad looked very pleased with himself. “He doesn’t talk too much. I like that. Men who talk too much are selling something.”

I sat down slowly.

“What did you talk about?”

“You.” He peeled a groundnut. “And he says you’ve never cooked for him.”

“Daddy…”

“Amanda. A man brings groundnuts to your sick father without being asked. Cook for him.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I took a groundnut, and ate it, and looked at the ceiling until my eyes stopped stinging.

He hadn’t told me. He hadn’t put it in a text or mentioned it at his mother’s lunch, where Imelda had spent an hour asking me about my “background” in the tone of a customs officer. He’d just gone.

I wasn’t sure what to do with that. I filed it under things to think about later. The file was getting very thick.

……………….

At nine that night, Tobi set up his laptop on my desk in Yaba, angled the lamp, and moved a pile of tulle swatches out of the shot.

“She’s nervous,” he said. “Let her talk. Don’t push.”

“I don’t push.”

Dami, in the corner, said nothing in a very loud way.

I went and stood next to him while Tobi fiddled with the microphone.

“You went to see my father,” I said, low.

“He’s very particular about groundnuts.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“You’d have told me not to.”

“I would have.” I looked at his profile, the stubborn line of his jaw. “Thank you.”

He didn’t look at me. But the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, and he said, “He thinks I don’t talk too much.”

“You don’t talk too much.”

“I know,” said Dami. “I’ve been told it’s my best quality.”

Bisi brought tea and sat on the floor, out of camera, with a notebook. “Head of Operations,” she whispered, “is taking minutes.”

The call connected.

Candice Mokoena was about my age, with close-cut hair and a thin gold chain at her throat. She was sitting in a small kitchen. Behind her, a kettle. A calendar from a pharmacy. A window with burglar bars, and a jacaranda tree beyond it.

“You’re Mandy,” she said.

“Amanda,” I said. Then, because it felt wrong to be careful with her: “Mandy. Either.”

She almost smiled.

“He called me his Candy,” she said. “And I loved it. I let him.”

I knew exactly what she meant.

“What does he call you?” she asked.

“Mandy. I make him say Amanda now.”

“Good,” she said. “Make him work for every syllable.”

……………….

She told it the way you tell something you’ve told yourself a thousand times in the dark. Flat. In order. No wasted words.

Marcus Lane. A charming accountant from Cape Town who came to fix her father’s books. Mokoena & Sons, a family logistics firm, three generations old. He was good with her father. He was good with her mother. He brought her grandmother sweets every Sunday.

I put my tea down very carefully.

“He made himself part of the family,” she said. “My father put him on the accounts. Then on the board. Then, when he proposed, my father signed half the firm over to us both, as a wedding gift.”

“And then?”

“And then I stood outside the Home Affairs office in Johannesburg in a white dress for three hours.” Her voice didn’t shake. That was the worst part. “He didn’t come. His phone was off. By the evening, the accounts were empty. By the end of the month, the firm was gone.”

Nobody in my office said anything.

Downstairs, for once, the Fuji had stopped. Even the phone-repair man seemed to be listening.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It sounded very small.

“Don’t be. You’re the only other one who knows what it feels like.” She leaned closer to her camera. “He left you with something, didn’t he? What?”

“A business loan,” I said. “In our business name. And an eleven-word text.”

She nodded, like that was exactly what she’d expected.

“And now he’s marrying a rich girl in Lagos,” she said. “I’ve seen her.”

“You’ve seen Tiwa?”

“Her I*******m. Tobi sent it.” She held up her phone to the camera. A photograph from the engagement shoot. My shoot. Tiwa laughing, hand to her face. The ring. “That’s my ring.”

The office went very quiet.

“He reset it,” Candice said. “New band. Same stone. I’d know it anywhere. My grandmother’s diamond. There’s a tiny flaw on the left side, like a feather, if you look under a light.”

I thought of the Sandton receipt. ‘For C.’

He hadn’t bought it for her. He’d bought a setting for a stone he’d already taken.

I had photographed that ring from every angle. I had held it in my hands and admired it. I had written ‘stunning!!’ in the caption.

My stomach turned over, slowly, like a pancake.

“Will you come?” I said. “To Lagos. If we need you. Before the wedding.”

Her face closed.

“No.”

“Candice, please. If you stood up and…”

“No.” Then, more gently: “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She looked at something off camera for a long moment. When she looked back, her eyes were wet, but her voice was still flat.

“Because when I went to the police,” she said, “they didn’t arrest him. They arrested me.”

Bisi stopped writing.

Tobi swore under his breath. In the corner, Dami had gone so still that I could hear a generator two buildings away, coughing itself awake.

“The money left my father’s firm through accounts with my name on them. My signature. My login. He’d built it that way from the start, so if anyone ever looked, they’d see me. I spent two years fighting fraud charges. I still can’t leave the country without permission from a court.”

My mouth had gone dry.

The Okorie & Cole account. First signatory: Chimamanda Okorie.

“Listen to me, Mandy.” Candice leaned so close to the camera that her face filled the screen. “Whatever you’re planning, he’s already planned for it.”

Behind me, I heard Dami stand up.

“He won’t just beat you,” she said. “He’ll make you the criminal. He did it to me.”