“I have been receiving alert notifications of fifty thousand naira every month for two years from an unknown sender.

**

By the sixth month, she had stopped questioning it.

She used the money wisely. Paid her rent. Sent some to her mother in the village. Bought a small gas cooker. Started saving what was left.

She told nobody except her closest friend, Ugochi.

“Adaeze, this is suspicious o,” Ugochi had said, eyes wide. “What if it’s a ritualist? What if someone is using you?”

“For what?” Adaeze had laughed. “They are giving me money. I am not giving them anything.”

“That’s what they want you to think.” Ugochi warned.

But month after month, nothing happened. No strange dreams. No mysterious visitors. No one asking for anything in return.

Just the alert. Every month. Fifty thousand. For Adaeze.

She began to relax.

She began to expect it.

Until the day she decided she needed to know who was sending it.

**

It was her mother who pushed her.

“Adaeze, find out who is doing this for you so we can at least pray for them.” Her mother had said during one of their calls. “Somebody is blessing you and you don’t even know their face.”

So on a Thursday morning, Adaeze dressed up and went to the bank with her debit card and her account details, ready to ask questions.

The teller who attended to her was a young woman about her age. She pulled up Adaeze’s account, looked at the transaction history, typed in the reference number.

Then she stopped typing.

She leaned closer to her screen.

She typed something else.

Then she stood up without saying a word and walked to the back office.

Adaeze waited.

Five minutes passed.

Then the teller returned with an older man — the branch manager, from the look of his suit and the way the other staff straightened when he walked past.

He looked at Adaeze.

Then at the screen.

Then back at Adaeze.

“Miss Adaeze,” he said carefully, pulling up a chair and sitting directly across the counter from her — something Adaeze had never seen a bank manager do before. “Can you come with me to my office please?”

“Is there a problem?” Adaeze asked.

“Please just come with me.” He said again.

Something cold moved through her chest.