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

**

She did not remember how she got out of the bank.

She found herself sitting on the concrete pavement outside, her handbag in her lap, people walking past her on both sides, the afternoon sun pressing down on her head.

Her father had died in 2003. A brief illness, her mother always said. She had no memory of him — only photographs.

But she knew his face. She had studied that face her whole life in the single framed photograph her mother kept above the television at home.

The same face on that account opening form.

The same man.

She pulled out her phone with shaking hands and called her mother.

“Mama.”

“Adaeze, how did the bank go? Did they find—”

“Mama, what was Daddy’s full name?”

A pause.

“Chukwuemeka Adaeze. Why?”

“What bank did he use?”

Another pause. Longer.

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Mama, please answer me.”

She heard her mother exhale slowly.

“He had an account at First Bank. Your uncle helped him open it when he first got a job. But it was dormant by the time he died. There was nothing in it.”

Adaeze closed her eyes.

“Mama.” She said quietly. “He has been sending me money from that account for two years.”

The silence on her mother’s end stretched so long that Adaeze checked to see if the call had dropped.

It hadn’t.

Then her mother spoke. And what she said made Adaeze’s hand press slowly against her own chest.

“Before your father died,” her mother whispered, “the last thing he said to me — the very last thing — was that he was sorry he couldn’t provide for you.” She paused. “He said, tell Adaeze I will find a way.”

Adaeze sat on that pavement for a very long time.

The alert that came in at that exact moment made her phone vibrate once in her hand.

Fifty thousand naira.

For Adaeze.