The clouds returned the next morning, not with rain, but with a gloom that hung over Mushin like a forgotten prophecy.
Zainab had barely slept. She turned all night in her single mattress on the floor of her one-room apartment behind the shop. The rain drummed on the zinc roof, and the shadows of her past played on the walls like a silent movie. Ilorin. Dapo. Police sirens. That slap from her aunt when the truth spilled. The shame. The disgrace.
She sat up just before dawn, wrapped in her checkered Ankara wrapper. Her Qur'an lay by her bedside, where it had always stayed. She opened to Surah Al-Furqan and recited softly, her voice trembling not from fear—but from a creeping awareness that something was coming.
Something dark.
Something she had seen before.
By 9am, she had opened the shop.
Customers flowed in one after the other. Old Mama Bisi came with her faded lace to rework. A slim university girl from UNILAG dropped off some fabric for a birthday dress. Three customers came just to take measurements. Normal day, normal madness.
But Zainab wasn't fully present.
Every time the curtain shifted, her eyes darted to the door.
Obinna didn't come.
Instead, by noon, a delivery boy brought a black nylon bag with a note.
"For my tailor with golden fingers. – O."
Inside the bag: suya, pineapple juice, and a small bottle of oud perfume.
Zainab dropped the nylon like it was burning her fingers.
She looked around.
No one had seen.
She picked up the note, read it again, then tore it into shreds and flushed it in the toilet behind her shop.
What kind of man gives gifts on the first meeting?
The kind that wants something. The kind who isn't just passing by. The kind who does things for a reason.
That night, she didn't sleep again.
And the next morning, Obi came.
It was a Saturday.
He wore a grey senator with clean sneakers. No agbada this time. Just style. Simplicity. Charm. He carried himself like he wasn't born in Nigeria—like Lagos traffic and danfo conductors didn't apply to him.
Zainab was ironing a customer's wrapper when he entered. She didn't greet him.
"I came early," he said, checking his watch. "But I figured you'd be the kind that wakes up before the birds."
Zainab kept ironing.
"Your cloth isn't ready," she said without looking at him.
"I know," he replied. "I didn't come for the cloth."
She stopped ironing.
Silence.
He stepped closer. Just enough to make her senses shift. But not enough to feel like a threat.
"I came to say thank you. I know people don't say that often. Especially men like me."
Zainab turned.
Her eyes locked on his.
"Men like you?"
He smiled.
"Men with secrets."
There it was.
He said it like a joke, like something a man would say to sound mysterious.
But Zainab didn't smile.
She had lived through one man's secrets already.
"I'm not interested in your secrets," she said coldly.
Obi shrugged. "Maybe. But they're interested in you."
That made her blink.
He placed something on her table. A small flash drive.
"What's that?" she asked.
"Your protection," he said. "Or your destruction. Depends on what you do with it."
He turned to leave.
"Wait," she called out.
He paused.
"What do you really want from me?"
Obi looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that digs. That strips. That unsettles.
"Nothing," he said. "Yet."
He left.
The moment he stepped out, Zainab locked the door.
Her hands shook as she picked up the flash drive. She turned it around, as if expecting it to reveal a warning.
Then she slid it into her old HP laptop.
What she saw on that screen froze her breath.
Bank statements. Names. Fake IDs. International transactions. Dozens of pictures. Of people she didn't know… and one she did.
Dapo.
Her ex.
The man who disappeared in Ilorin.
The man who set her up.
There he was—laughing in a photo with Obi.
Holding a drink.
Wearing the same wristwatch she once bought him for his birthday.
Her knees buckled.
She fell to the floor, trembling.
This wasn't random.
This wasn't just business.
Obi knew Dapo.
Obi had come for a reason.
And Zainab?
She was now part of something again.
Not by choice.
But by design.
The threads had begun to weave—and this time, the fabric was danger itself.