"Sit back down," Maria said. "I am not done yet."
Deemata sat.
The kitchen was bright now, fully morning, the kind of light that left nowhere to hide. She had thought they were finished. She had thought the weight of what she had already been given was the full weight. She understood now, looking at Maria's face, that she had been wrong.
"Do you remember," Maria said slowly, "when your father was in the operating theatre? When they had taken him in and you and your mother were outside in that corridor — crying, praying, sitting with the not-knowing of it?"
Deemata said nothing. She remembered. She would always remember. The plastic chairs. The smell of antiseptic and floor cleaner. Her mother's hands wrapped around hers, both of them cold.
"I came to you that night," Maria continued. "You were in no state to receive me, and I could not bring myself to add to what you were already carrying. So I did not stay long. But before I came to find you — I went in."
Deemata looked up. "Into the theatre?"
"I have ways," Maria said simply, and Deemata understood this to be true in the same way she understood everything about Maria — not to be questioned, only accepted. "I went in, and I saw what was happening in that room. And what I saw—" she paused, something moving across her face that was the controlled surface of a much larger feeling, "—was not what should have been happening."
She set both hands flat on the table.
"The doctors and nurses were not working on your father with urgency. They were casual. That is the only word I have for it. Talking among themselves. Laughing at something. Dr. Gonzalo — I will not say his full name, but you will know how to find him — was not focused on the man on that table. He was not doing everything that could be done. He was doing enough to say that he had tried. And there is a difference between those two things, Dee, and your father was on the wrong side of it."
The kitchen went very still.
"The day before your father went into the hospital," Maria continued, her voice lower now, "Henry Williams had called him. He told your father that enough time had passed, that old grievances were foolish between men who had known each other as long as they had. He invited him to talk. He said: letbuy guns be guns. Let us be friends again."
"And your father went," Deemata said.
"Your father went. Because he was your grandfather's grandson in every way that mattered — open-hearted, forgiving, willing to believe the best of people even when the evidence asked him not to. But here is what you do not know yet, and what you will have to find for yourself because I do not have the full shape of it:" Maria leaned forward slightly. "Before he went to see Henry, your father had discovered something. Something he had been quietly piecing together for months. Something so significant that if it had become public, Henry Williams' career — his name, his dynasty, everything — would have been finished."
"What was it?" Deemata asked.
"I don't know the specifics. Rahim never told me the details — I think he was protecting me, the way he always tried to protect the people he loved from the sharpest edges of things. What I know is that he went to Henry carrying that knowledge, perhaps believing that the knowledge itself was protection. That Henry would see reason. That the threat of exposure was enough."
She looked at Deemata steadily.
"Your father was too trusting. Just like his grandfather before him. And I am glad — truly glad — that you did not inherit that particular quality. Not because trust is a weakness, but because in this situation, against this family, it has already cost too much."
Deemata sat with this for a long moment. Outside a bird was singing in the garden, indifferent and clear and entirely unbothered by anything happening inside this kitchen.
"The hospital," she said finally. "The footage from that night. The records. Dr. Gonzalo."
"That is your next step," Maria said. "Yes."
"And whatever my father found about Henry — that is the step after."
"Yes."
They looked at each other across the table — two women, the morning fully arrived around them, the weight of three generations pressing down on everything and somehow not crushing either of them.
Maria stood. She smoothed her robe. She pressed her hand briefly to Deemata's cheek — the gesture of a woman who had known her since before she understood the world — and she left.
Deemata sat alone in the kitchen for a little while longer. Then she washed both cups and went upstairs to get ready for work.
Her mother was in the hallway when she came back down. Martha took one look at her face and said nothing for a moment.
"Are you alright?" she asked.
"I'm getting there," Deemata said. "She told me about the hospital."
Something in Martha's expression settled — the particular settling of a person who has been waiting for a door to open and has just heard it.
"Then you know the next step."
"I know the next step," Deemata confirmed.
Martha reached out and adjsted the collar of her daughter's jacket — small, precise, entirely maternal. "Slowly. Carefully. Every step accounted for." She met her eyes. "Your grandmother Shameka did not rush this. Neither will we."
"I know, Mum."
"Go to work. Be yourself. Let him call you." A pause. "And come home for dinner."
Deemata almost smiled. "Yes, Mum."
Reginald called fifteen minutes into the drive. She answered on the second ring.
"Good morning," he said. His voice was careful — measured in the way it got when he was thinking around something rather than directly at it.
"Good morning. How did you sleep?"
"Not particularly well." A pause. "I keep replaying last night. The lights, the screen — I can't place it as a prank, Dee. The targeting was too specific. That image was not random."
"I know it wasn't random," she said, keeping her voice warm. "Your father is the Mayor. There are always people who want to unsettle powerful men. It doesn't mean the accusations have substance."
"I know. I'm telling myself the same thing." He stopped. Started again. "Something feels off and I can't locate where the feeling is coming from. That bothers me more than the event itself."
"Instincts need evidence before they become conclusions," she said. "Find the evidence first. Then decide what you think."
A long pause. "You always know what to say."
"I know what makes sense. That's different."
He was quiet for a moment, and she could feel him almost-smiling. "I'm headed to the office. Can I see you later? There's somewhere I want to take you."
"Text me when you're done," she said. "I'll be there."
The morning meeting was with Mrs. Francesca Thomas — a woman who had been buying Watt fabric for eleven years and had become something closer to a fixture than a client. She was sixty-something, unmarried by choice, childless by choice, and she moved through the world with the particular unhurried authority of someone who had decided exactly who she was and had no interest in adjusting it for anyone. She owned three boutiques. She dressed her own way. She knew almost everything about people, and she had always had an unusual fondness for Deemata that operated somewhat independently of business.
They worked through the spring orders — fabrics, quantities, the new linen blend for Lagos. It was good, productive work, the kind that cleared the mind. When the business was done and the room was quieter, Francesca looked at her.
"My baby," she said. "Why are you carrying something heavy today? Your face is giving you away."
Deemata opened her mouth to deflect and Francesca raised one hand.
"I am not asking you to tell me what it is. I am simply telling you that I see it, because I think it helps sometimes to know that someone does." She folded her hands. "Whatever you are planning — take three steps back before you take six forward. Make sure your footing is right before you commit the weight. That is all."
Deemata looked at her and felt something ease, just slightly, in the way it eases when someone sees you without requiring anything from the seeing.
"Thank you," she said. "Genuinely."
Francesca picked up her bag. "You are a remarkable young woman," she said, as simply as she might say the fabric was excellent quality. "Have a blessed day." And she left.
Lisa arrived twenty minutes later and dropped into the chair across from Deenmata with the directness of someone who had been saving a conversation.
"Last night was real," she said. "I'm scared. My dad has never — that has never happened. Someone wanted to say something and they said it in the worst possible place and I don't know what to do with it."
Deemata handed her a glass of water. "Remember what you always say about your dad?"
"That he's a politician and anything can happen."
"Right. Powerful men attract powerful enemies. It doesn't make last night nothing. But it also doesn't mean the sky is falling."
Lisa looked at her. "You're very calm for someone who was standing in that room."
"One of us has to be."
A beat. Then Lisa laughed — small, relieved. "This is why I need you." She grabbed her hand briefly. "I'm scared for my brother too. Whatever is going on is going to land on Reginald and he's going to try to fix it and I don't know if this is fixable."
Deemata looked at their joined hands. She thought: I am sorry. I am doing this for your own good, and mine, and everyone who was lost before either of us understood the cost.
She said: "I'm here. For both of you. Whatever comes."
And she meant it. Both things at once, entirely. Which was the most honest she had been all morning.
He picked her up at five and drove her to a quiet stretch of coast away from the tourist edges of the city, where the road ended at a low wall and beyond it the sand was wide and the water was calm. They walked without deciding to, side by side, the way you do with someone whose presence is already comfortable enough that movement feels natural. He was quieter than usual. She gave him the space of it.
After a while he reached for her hand. She let him take it.
At the edge where the path met the sand, they stopped and looked out at the water. The light was long and copper-coloured.
"I keep going around it," he said. "Last night. Part of me wants to believe it's nothing and part of me keeps saying there's something underneath that I can't see yet."
"Then look," she said. "Carefully. Without deciding the answer before you find the evidence."
He turned to her. The evening light was in his face. "Thank God I found you," he said. "For some reason you quiet things in me that nothing else quiets. I can't explain it properly."
"You don't have to explain it," she said. "Just let it be what it is."
He was quiet. Then, so casually it almost wasn't a question: "What if I made you my girlfriend? Right now. What would you say?"
She heard it clearly. She understood what it meant to him and what it would cost her to answer it one way or the other in this moment, carrying everything she was carrying.
She turned to him and smiled — warm, present, real — and said: "Thank you for bringing me here." She squeezed his hand. "It's a beautiful spot."
He recognised that she had not answered. She watched him decide not to push, which she had known he would, and which made everything harder.
"We'll come back," he said.
"We will," she agreed.
They ended up at a roadside stall further down the path — noodles, fried chicken, a chilli sauce that arrived without warning and was spectacular. They sat on a low wall and ate from paper containers and at some point both of them were laughing about something that was probably not that funny, and it was, despite everything, one of the easiest hours she had spent in recent memory.
He drove her home as the night settled. At the door he pressed a kiss to her cheek so careful and warm that she felt it for the full five minutes she spent getting ready for bed. She stood at her window afterward and looked at the street and thought: I am sorry. And then: I am not sorry enough to stop. Both completely true.
Across the city, Henry Williams sat on the edge of his bed with his phone in his hand and Rebecca in the bathroom.
He dialled his assistant. "The incident last night," he said, low and even. "Find out how it was done. Who had access to the venue's systems. And find me everything on the Watt family. The mother. The daughter. Their business. Their history. Everything. Leave nothing out."
He hung up. Rebecca came out, sat beside him, took his hands. "It's nothing," she said. "A prank. Come to bed."
He lay down. He looked at the ceiling. To himself, in the silence of his own mind, he said: I will not go down. I have come too far. Whatever is coming — I will not go down.
He believed it. He had always believed it. The problem with beliefs built on buried things, however, is that the buried things do not share them.
And somewhere across the city, a woman with her great-grandmother's eyes was making a list of everything she still needed to find.