“The truth,” she said. “And time to prove it.”
That night she let us stay in a tiny back room off the office. It held a narrow bed, a battered dresser, and a standing fan that rattled when it oscillated, but to me it felt safer than any hotel in the city.
Before I lay down, I asked her, “Why are you doing this? Why help this much?”
For the first time, she looked away from me.
“Because your father saved my life once,” she said. “A long time ago. And because my own husband once tried to kill me. I know exactly what this kind of shock feels like.”
Then she looked back at me.
“I promised Langston that if the day ever came, I would be here.”
I wanted to thank her.
Instead, all I could say was, “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
She gave me a thin, knowing smile.
“Don’t thank me yet. The game has just begun.”
I slept maybe three hours.
When I woke, it was to Kenzo shaking my shoulder, disoriented and scared, asking where we were. It took a moment for memory to rush back in, and when it did, it hit with the cold force of a bucket of ice water.
My husband had tried to kill us.
No matter how many times my mind repeated it, the sentence still felt unreal.
The television in the front office made it real.
At seven o’clock, Zunaira knocked on the door and said, “Turn on Channel 2.”
The morning news was already running aerial footage.
Massive fire destroys luxury home in Buckhead. Fate of family unknown.
The camera hovered over the blackened skeleton of my house while firefighters picked through debris and steam rose into the gray Atlanta morning.
Then the reporter cut to the street, where Kwesi had just arrived.
He stepped out of an Uber in the same suit pants and wrinkled shirt he had likely worn on the flight home, one hand on his head, horror arranged carefully across his face.
The performance was perfect.
“My wife—my son—for God’s sake, someone tell me they weren’t in there,” he shouted, his voice breaking at exactly the right places.
The reporter described him as a desperate husband who had landed from a business trip and rushed straight to the scene.
A father clinging to hope.
I felt Kenzo press closer against me.
“He’s lying,” he whispered.
“Yes,” I said. “He is.”
And once you knew the truth, you could see it in every detail. The way he checked where the cameras were before turning his face just enough toward them. The way no real tears fell. The way he kept asking the fire chief, “Have you found the bodies yet?” not like a man begging for miracles, but like a man demanding confirmation that his money was secure.
Zunaira muted the television.
“He’ll spend all day trying to confirm you’re dead,” she said. “When no bodies turn up, he’ll realize something went wrong. That gives us a narrow window.”
She sat on the edge of her desk.
“Do you know the combination to the safe in his office?”
