Sweety Abba Gb

The Man Who Returned at Midnight

CHAPTER ONE
The rain had started before dusk, beating lightly on the roof as if trying to warn me of something. I was alone in the shop, counting the day’s sales, when I heard the first knock. It was slow and firm, the kind a tired man makes when he has travelled far. I thought it was a customer who had lost track of time, so I answered at once.
A man stood there with a faded bag on his shoulder. His clothes were dusty. His expression was empty.
“I am looking for Nnenna,” he said.
The name froze me on the spot. My elder sister had been dead for nine years.

CHAPTER TWO
I stepped aside and let him in, partly because of the rain, partly because something in his voice sounded familiar. He moved with the weariness of a man used to walking long roads. When he sat down, he removed his hat and placed it on his knee.
“You are her brother,” he said. He did not ask. He stated it.
I studied his face then. There was something strange about him. He looked like someone I should have known, yet I could not place him.
“How did you know her?” I asked.
He opened the faded bag. Inside was a photograph. When he passed it to me, my hands trembled. It was Nnenna at eighteen, smiling in front of our old house.
But the date behind the photo was from last year.

CHAPTER THREE
My first thought was that the man was lying. The second was worse. If this picture was recent, then someone was using her image for something.
The man watched me quietly. He had the patience of someone who had been carrying a burden for far too long.
“She gave this to me,” he said. “She asked me to find you if anything happened to her.”
My breath caught in my throat.
“What happened to her?”
He looked away. The light flickered.
“She vanished.”

CHAPTER FOUR
I locked the shop door and drew the curtains. Something told me the story required privacy. The man placed his bag on the table and poured out a few more items: a small notebook, a broken bracelet, and a bus ticket torn at the edges.
“These were the last things in her room,” he said.
I opened the notebook. The first page carried her handwriting. The second page carried a warning.
“Do not trust anyone from home.”
My hands began to shake again.
The man leaned forward.
“Your sister was not who you thought she was.”

CHAPTER FIVE
He told the story in a calm voice. He had met Nnenna in a small border town where she worked under a different name. She kept mostly to herself, avoiding crowds, refusing to stay in one place for too long.
“She said she had seen something she was never supposed to see,” he said.
I wanted to argue, but the pieces were starting to fit into a pattern I had ignored for years.
When Nnenna died nine years ago, her body had never been found. We buried an empty coffin.
The man placed a hand on the bag.
“She believed someone from your past was after her.”
Then he said a name I had not heard in sixteen years.
A name I had hoped never to hear again.

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