Chapter Two
The morning sun crept through Adanna's curtains, thin rays slicing across a desk cluttered with coffee mugs, scattered notes, and newspaper cuttings. Her flat was a small one of those quiet apartments in Wuse 2, old but functional, with walls that had heard too many unspoken things.
Sleep had refused to come. She had spent the entire night staring at that email, as if the words might change the hundredth time she read them.
"The man who vanished five years ago, the one you believed had died, lives. And he's not as you imagined him to be."
Her chest tightened each time she reached that line. Kenechukwu Okafor. "Rune". The man she'd loved and lost, the man who had turned her entire world into a question mark.
For five years, she'd buried his name under deadlines and denial. But love has a way of leaving fingerprints that never fade. Even when she told herself she'd moved on, she could still hear the echoes of his laughter, still remember how he used to call her Ada m, like she was both trouble and treasure.
Now the same smile haunted her.
Was he alive?
And if yes, why reach out after all these years?
Her phone vibrated sharply. Unknown number. She hesitated, then answered.
"Hello?"
Silence. Then, that voice was smooth, low, unmistakable.
"Still chasing ghosts, Adanna?"
Her breath caught.
"Kene?"
"Don't look for me." His tone was calm, almost sorrowful. "And whatever you do, don't trust anyone from The Sentinel."
The line went dead.
She stared at the phone like it might explain itself. Then, her laptop flickered, and the email disappeared. A blank page blinked twice before two new words appeared:
Too late.
Then, darkness. Power outage. Abuja's trademark silence followed the hum of ceiling fans fading into nothing.
Adanna stood in the half-light, her pulse pounding. Whoever sent that message had access to her system. Someone was watching her.
The next morning, she walked into The Sentinel's newsroom a long hall filled with the chaotic hum of ringing phones and impatient editors. She'd worked there for years before everything went wrong. People still whispered when they saw her.
"Adanna," a voice called. She turned to see Bimbo, one of the old editors who still respected her. Mid-forties, calm, sharp-eyed.
"You shouldn't be here," he said quietly, motioning her into his small office. "Your name still rattles people upstairs."
"I just need files from the 2020 corruption case the Kalu investigation," she said.
He sighed. "You mean the one that blew up your career?"
"Yes."
Bimbo leaned forward, lowering his voice. "Someone came here last week asking questions about you. Said they were with Internal Affairs. They wanted your old case notes every file related to Okafor, Kalu, and that missing money trail."
Adanna's pulse quickened. "Did you give them anything?"
He shook his head. "I said I didn't know where you kept them."
Then his tone softened. "Adanna, you need to be careful. Something is moving underground, journalists are being silenced again."
She nodded faintly, pretending not to be scared. But her hands trembled. She left the building fast, clutching a brown envelope of old notes Bimbo slipped her before she left.
Back home, she spread the papers across her table. Old articles, names, numbers, all leading to that night. And there, buried in a half-finished draft, was a line she'd written years ago but never published:
"If he were alive, he wouldn't stay silent. Not Kene. Unless silence was safer than truth."
She stared at it, heart pounding. The more she read, the clearer it became that everything led back to him.
A sudden noise made her turn. The window rattled slightly. She moved closer, pulled the curtain back and froze.
Across the street, in a parked black car, someone was watching her. The tinted window slid up slowly as soon as she noticed. The car drove off without a sound.
Adanna stood there for a long time, her fingers gripping the curtain.
The whispers were real. The void wasn't empty. And if Kene was alive, then he was either in grave danger or part of something much bigger than she could imagine.