By the time Miles made it back to his aunt’s place, the sun was fully up, throwing hard yellow light across the compound wall where somebody’s washing hung out to dry.
His legs felt like borrowed things.
Every stair up to her flat pulled at muscles he didn’t know he had until last night.
She opened the door before he even knocked, wrapper tied loose around her waist, a wooden spoon still in her hand like she’d run straight from the pot.
“Ah ah, Miles.” She looked him up and down — the grey cement dust ground into his jeans, the raw red mark across his palm he’d tried to hide in his pocket.
“You this boy.
What is all this?
You said you were working.”
“I was working, Mami.” He tried to keep his voice light.
“Just…
it’s a rough kind of work.”
“Rough work.” She sucked her teeth, already turning back into the flat, waving him in with the spoon.
“Come and sit down before you fall down for my doorstep.”
The smell hit him before anything else — pepper soup, the sharp bite of scent leaf, something frying low and patient on the back burner.
His stomach folded in on itself.
He hadn’t eaten anything real since the ramen cup two nights ago, whatever life that had been.
He sat at the small table, the same wobbly one from his memory, one leg still propped up with a folded newspaper.
His aunt set a plate in front of him without asking, then sat across from him, elbows on the table, watching him eat like she was cataloguing every bite.
“So,” she said.
“This contract of yours.
Not the summary you gave me on the phone.”
Miles laughed — an actual laugh, surprising himself with it, the first one in what felt like a year instead of a day.
“It’s a business, Mami.
Small commercial property.
I’m going to run it properly.”
“With cement under your nails again.” She reached across and grabbed his hand before he could pull it back, turning his palm up, clicking her tongue at the blister there.
“I thought you finished with tiling.”
“I did finish with tiling.” He let her hold his hand a second longer than he needed to.
“This is just…
a different kind of building.”
“Hm.” She didn’t believe him, not fully, but she let it sit, the way she always did when she decided a fight wasn’t worth having yet.
She got up to check the pot, and over her shoulder, not looking at him, she said, “Your sister said you sounded strange on the phone yesterday.
Like something was chasing you.”
His stomach dropped for half a second before he caught it.
“She’s exaggerating.”
“She’s not the one who exaggerates in this house.” Aunty turned around, wooden spoon pointed at him now like a weapon.
“That one is you, since primary school.
Miles, if trouble is following you, you tell me.
You hear?
Not your sister. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Not your friends online.
Me.”
“Nothing is following me, Mami.” The lie came out smoother than he expected, and it left something bitter sitting under his tongue that had nothing to do with the pepper soup.
She studied him a moment longer, then let it go with a small shake of her head, muttering something under her breath about how all young men think they can carry the whole sky on one shoulder.
She sat back down and started telling him about the woman two doors down who’d tried to sell her fake rice at market price, and Miles let himself laugh again, properly this time, at the outrage in her voice, at the way she did the woman’s exact haggling tone with her hands flying.
For twenty minutes, there was no system.
No gold text.
No countdown ticking anywhere behind his eyes.
Just his aunt’s kitchen, the smell of pepper soup, and a story about fake rice that had absolutely nothing to do with frequencies or Vertex or a matchbox-sized thing waiting to be found behind a horn speaker three blocks away.
He didn’t tell her about the money.
Not yet.
He wanted her to see it first — the lease, the sign out front, something she could touch with her own two hands before she’d believe any of it was real and not some new trouble he’d talked himself into.
When he finally got up to leave, she pulled him into a hug at the door, shorter than him now in a way that still caught him off guard, and pressed something into his palm — a folded five hundred naira note, the kind of gesture she’d been making since he was twelve, useless against what sat in his Opay account now, priceless for exactly that reason.
“Eat well,” she said.
“And come back and tell me the truth eventually.
I am not stupid, Miles.”
“I know, Mami.”
He walked back down the stairwell of her building slower than he’d climbed it, the folded note still in his fist, and it wasn’t until he hit the street that the gold line flickered faintly back to life at the edge of his vision — quiet, patient, waiting for him to remember it was still there.