The words came out in jagged pieces at first. The brightness of the terminal. Quasi’s smile. Kenzo’s whisper. The van. The key. The gasoline. The fire climbing up the walls.
I showed her the text from Quasi, my hands shaking so badly I almost dropped my phone.
She listened without interrupting, her gaze steady, her face unreadable.
When I finished, I sat there breathing hard, like I’d run a mile.
The room hummed with the old air conditioner. Somewhere outside, a car passed slowly, bass thumping faintly.
Attorney Okafor leaned back in her chair.
“Your father asked me to watch out for you,” she said quietly.
My throat tightened. “He thought something like this would happen?”
“He didn’t know the details,” she said. “But he knew your husband wasn’t what he pretended to be.”
She stood and walked to a tall metal filing cabinet, unlocked the bottom drawer, and pulled out a thick folder worn at the edges.
She set it on the desk like she was laying down a weapon.
“Three years ago, your father hired a private investigator,” she said. “He wanted Quasi looked into. Quietly.”
My stomach dropped. “What did they find?”
Attorney Okafor opened the folder, flipping through pages with practiced precision.
“Debt,” she said. “A lot of it. Your husband has a gambling problem. Underground games. Dangerous lenders. The kind of people who don’t accept apologies, only payments.”
She slid papers toward me. Grainy photos. Bank statements. Notes.
“His businesses have been effectively bankrupt for two years,” she continued. “He’s been patching holes with money that should never have been his.”
My mouth went dry. “What money?”
She met my eyes. “Your mother’s inheritance.”
The room swayed. I gripped the mug hard enough to hurt.
My mother had left me one hundred fifty thousand dollars. Not wealth, but security. A buffer. I’d put it in a joint account because we were married, because Quasi had smiled and said, “What’s mine is yours, babe.”
He’d taken it.
“All of it,” Attorney Okafor said gently, as if she knew how hard the words would land. “Every cent.”
Something hot moved through me. Rage, sharp and clean.
“And now?” I asked, voice thin.
“Now he owes close to half a million,” she said. “And the people he owes want payment.”
I stared down at the papers like they might rearrange themselves into a different reality.
“How does burning the house help him?” I whispered.
Attorney Okafor didn’t blink. “Life insurance.”
My stomach turned.
“You have a policy for two and a half million, correct?” she asked.
I nodded, barely able to speak. “Yes.”
“And the beneficiary?” she pressed.
“Quasi.”
She nodded once. “There it is. He dies your life, he collects, he pays his debts, he starts fresh. He’s ‘free.’”
Kenzo’s whisper at the airport echoed in my head.
He said he was finally going to be free.
I looked over at my sleeping child on the couch and felt something in me fracture and fuse at the same time. Love and fury braided together.
“But we didn’t die,” I said.
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