Campus Babe, Episode 7: The Ex-Girlfriend's Warning
She did not tell him on Sunday.
She had meant to. She had lain awake until four in the morning with the photograph glowing on her screen, rehearsing the sentence. Daniel, I need to ask you about your father. It sounded so simple in the dark. But on Sunday afternoon, when she crossed the quad toward the library and saw him sitting on the steps with a book on his knee and a packet of roasted groundnuts beside him, saving her a place, the sentence dissolved like salt in water.
"You look tired," he said.
"I didn't sleep."
"Is it the Crest Confessions thing?"
"Partly."
He studied her for a moment. He did not push. He only moved the groundnuts a few inches closer, and said, "Eat something."
She ate. She laughed at something he said about Emeka's new haircut. And the whole time, the photograph sat in her pocket like a live coal.
At 6:15 that evening, her phone buzzed.
You're ignoring me. I notice these things.
She looked at Kolade's message for a long time. Then she turned the phone face-down on her knee and said nothing, to him or to anyone.
"Blessing. Five minutes."
The voice came from behind her on Tuesday, outside the Mass Communication department, as she was reading a notice about the semester's assignment deadlines. She turned and nearly dropped her bag.
Bisola stood there in a plain grey top and jeans, her hair tied back, with dark circles under her eyes and a look of exhausted resolve. In daylight she looked younger than she had in the house on the hill. Also more tired. A girl who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time.
"I have nothing to say to you," Blessing said, because it seemed the safest thing.
"Then listen. You don't have to say anything." Bisola glanced over her shoulder. A group of students was drifting toward the noticeboard. "Not here. Please."
Something in her tone made Blessing hesitate. Against every instinct, she followed.
They ended up on the concrete bleachers beside the football field, a hundred metres from anyone, with the pitch stretched dry and golden before them and the harmattan haze softening the far goalposts. Bisola sat with her elbows on her knees. For a minute, neither of them spoke.
"I'm not here to cause a scene," Bisola said finally. "I know what it looked like on Saturday. I know what everyone thinks. The bitter ex. The jealous girl. That's what he wants them to think."
"That's what he told me you were."
"I know." She laughed, short and tired. "He's good at it. That's the first thing you need to understand. Kolade doesn't lie badly. He tells you a story that sounds so reasonable you start to apologise for doubting it."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I watched you walk into that house in a green dress he bought, and I recognised the walk." Bisola's voice was low. "I wore a blue one. Two years ago. It was beautiful. It fit perfectly. I thought, nobody has ever noticed what size I am before."
Blessing said nothing.
"He started the same way," Bisola went on. "Gifts. Rides. The way he looked at you, like you were the only person in a crowded room. I'd never been looked at like that. My father drives a bus. My mother cleans offices. I was the first person in my family to get into university, and I was so tired of being invisible." She wiped her eye with the heel of her hand, angrily. "He paid for my books. He paid my school fees when the scholarship was delayed. He took me to dinners where I didn't know which fork to use, and he never once made me feel stupid. I believed he loved me, Blessing. I really did. I honestly thought it was real."
"Maybe it was," Blessing said, before she could stop herself.
"Maybe it was. That's what makes it so hard." Bisola turned to her. "I think he did love me, in the way he knows how. The way someone loves a house they've bought. They keep it clean and they lock the doors."
A cold prickle ran up Blessing's arms.
"It started small," Bisola said. "He wanted to know where I was. Not in a creepy way. 'Where are you, babe? I miss you.' Then 'Who's that you're with?' Then 'Why didn't you tell me you'd be at the library?' By the second year, he knew my timetable better than I did. He knew who I ate lunch with. He'd say things like, 'Funmi's not good for you, you know,' and I'd think, he's just looking out for me."
"Funmi?"
"My best friend. We'd known each other since the first week of first year." Bisola looked out at the field. "One day I found out Funmi had been reporting to him. Every conversation. Every plan. He'd been paying her. Two thousand naira a week, and a promise to help her father's business. She cried when I confronted her. She said she thought she was helping. She said Kolade told her I was struggling, that I was lying to everyone, that I needed to be watched for my own good."
The words came one after another, flat and exhausted, the way people speak about things they have said many times to an empty room.
"I tried to leave. That's when it got worse. He called my department head and said I was behaving inappropriately. He told our mutual friends I'd been cheating on him. Someone leaked a screenshot of a private conversation, edited to look like something it wasn't. I had a scholarship interview in the UK that month. They withdrew the invitation after a 'concern about character' was raised." Her voice cracked. "I never found out who raised it. But I know who had the access."
Blessing sat very still.
"He never hit me," Bisola said. "I want you to know that. Nothing you could put in a police report. He just... slowly arranged my life so that every road led back to him. And when I finally walked away, he made sure there was nothing left on the other side."
The wind moved across the dry pitch. Somewhere a whistle blew.
"I don't believe you," Blessing said.
It came out quietly. She did not know whether she meant it.
"I know."
"You hate him. He hates you. Anything you say about him is going to be..."
"Biased?" Bisola smiled thinly. "Of course it is. I hate him more than I've ever hated anyone. But that doesn't make me a liar. It makes me an expert."
"He paid my brother's school fees."
"He paid mine too."
"He helped my family when no one else would."
"Yes." Bisola held her gaze. "He helps. That's how it works. He gives you something you can't refuse. And the next time he asks for something, you can't refuse that either. And the time after that, you don't even notice you've stopped refusing." She stood and brushed dust from her jeans. "Ask yourself a few questions. Does he know where you are without you telling him? Has he ever told you who you should or shouldn't spend time with? When you don't answer his calls, how does he sound?"
Blessing's mind flew to the Range Rover at the library steps, stopping exactly at the entrance she hadn't mentioned. To the car outside the hostel on Friday night, waiting under the lamp. To fourteen messages before noon. Seen at 9:14. I noticed. To the cold, pleasant voice on Wednesday: When I call, I'd like you to answer. To a boy named Daniel in a quad, and Kolade's smile, thin as paper.
"I'm not saying run," Bisola said. "I'm not saying anything, really. I'm only saying you should look."
"Why?"
"Because nobody told me." She picked up her bag. "Maybe it would have mattered."
She walked away across the dry grass. Blessing watched her go, a small, straight figure under the pale sky, and did not know what to believe.
The Ibadan Public Library smelled of paper and ceiling fans.
Daniel had been coming here on Wednesdays for three weeks. It was a long bus ride from campus, and the archive room on the second floor was cramped and dim, with a microfilm reader that wheezed like an old man climbing stairs. But the librarian, a quiet woman in her fifties named Mrs. Odufuwa, had stopped asking questions after the second visit. She now simply pointed to the machine and said, "It's free this morning."
He threaded the film. The spool ticked. Newspaper pages slid past in grainy grey, advertisements for cement and cooking oil, headlines about a state election, a flood, a footballer's wedding. He was looking for a specific week in October, twelve years ago. He had looked for it a dozen times in his head, and never once had the courage to look in a newspaper.
Do not hope, he told himself, the way he had told himself every day since he was eleven. Hope is how they get you.
But he found it on the third reel.
It was a small piece on page nine of the Ibadan Courier, wedged between a weather report and an advertisement for a tailor. Easy to miss. He read the date twice: 14 October.
BALOGUN HOLDINGS REPORTS CLEAN ANNUAL AUDIT
Balogun Holdings has completed its annual audit across all subsidiaries and found "no irregularities of any kind," a company spokesman said on Friday. The audit, which covered the Oriental Plains Agro group among others, concluded that "all accounts are in order and fully reconciled." Chief Richard Balogun, chairman of the group, said the result reflected "the integrity of every member of our team." When asked about the recent departure of a senior accountant, the Chief declined to comment, adding only that he "wished Mr. Adebayo well, a good man who made a mistake."
Daniel stopped breathing.
He read it again, slowly, his finger moving along the screen. Then a third time. The words had not changed, but the room seemed to tilt around them.
He knew the official account. He had known it his whole life, the way a child knows the shape of the furniture in a dark room. His father had been dismissed on 5 October after an internal audit discovered serious financial discrepancies in the Oriental Plains account. He had signed a statement admitting negligence. The company, in its generosity, had declined to press charges. That was the story. That was the account that had followed the family from the house on Oluyole Street to the cramped flat in Molete, from his mother's silence to his father's hands, cracked and scarred by years of painting other people's walls.
Internal audit discovered serious discrepancies, said the company, on 5 October.
Annual audit found no irregularities of any kind, said the same company, nine days later.
One of those statements was a lie.
Both could not be true. If the accounts had been in order on 14 October, then there had been nothing for an auditor to discover on the fifth. And if there had been discrepancies on the fifth, someone had fixed them, or hidden them, or never existed, within a week and a half.
A good man who made a mistake.
What mistake? If the books were clean, what had his father done?
He photographed the page with his phone. His hands were shaking, so he took it three times. Then he sat for a long time in the dim, wheezing room, staring at a grey rectangle of newsprint twelve years old, feeling something move inside him that he had not allowed to move since he was a boy.
Not hope. Something harder than hope.
Proof.
"I need to tell you something," Blessing said.
It was Thursday night, in the lab. The air conditioner had been fixed and was now too cold. Emeka had gone out to find noodles. The fluorescent tube hummed over a desk strewn with cables, cold coffee, and the printed spreadsheet of guest names that neither of them had looked at in two days.
Daniel looked up. He had been quiet all evening, and she had noticed, and had not known how to ask.
"I need to tell you something too," he said.
"Me first."
"Okay."
She took out her phone. Her hand was steady, which surprised her. She opened the message from Kolade and slid the device across the desk.
Daniel looked at the photograph. For a long moment he did not move. His face did not change, exactly. It simply emptied, the way a room empties when the lights go out, until there was nothing left on it but stillness.
"Where did you get this?"
"Kolade sent it. On Saturday night." She swallowed. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I didn't know how."
"That's my father."
"I know."
He touched the screen with one finger, very lightly, as if it might burn. The man in the photograph smiled his shy, unused smile, holding a plaque beside the Chief.
"I haven't seen this picture," Daniel said. "My mother burned most of them. She said it was easier." He pulled his hand back. "Kolade knew."
"He'd found out. I don't know how." She hesitated. "Daniel, there's more. I should have said it weeks ago. At the party in Bodija, no, at the other one, the gathering on the hill, I overheard something. In a side room. It was Chief Balogun, and another man."
He turned his head.
"They were talking about a student," she said. "A student who'd been asking questions at the records office. About something called Oriental Plains. Twelve years ago. The other man said the student's father had signed the documents." She forced herself to say the rest. "The Chief said that his father signed what he was told to sign. He said the boy was nobody. A scholarship student. He said scholarships can be reviewed. And that digging needs access, and access can be removed."
The lab was very quiet.
"I didn't know it was you," she added, too quickly. "Not for certain. I thought... I remembered something you'd said once, in the cafeteria queue, about your father and a signature, and I thought maybe, but I wasn't sure, and I didn't know what it meant, and I was afraid..."
"Of what?"
"Of making it real."
He looked at her for a long time. Then, very slowly, something in his shoulders eased.
"Thank you for telling me now," he said.
"I should have said it on Friday. At dinner. Before."
"You didn't know what you were holding." His voice was rough. "I've been carrying this for twelve years. I understand not knowing where to put it down."
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Without them his face looked younger, unguarded, almost boyish.
"My father worked for Balogun Holdings for fourteen years," he said. "He was the chief accountant. He wore a tie every day. He believed in the company. He said it was the first place that had ever trusted him with something that mattered." He put the glasses on the desk. "Then one October, he found something in the Oriental Plains accounts. Money moving where it shouldn't. He wrote a letter to the board. Three weeks later, he was dismissed. They said an internal audit had found discrepancies, that he'd been negligent, possibly worse. They made him sign a statement. The company, in its goodness, did not press charges."
"And he signed."
"He signed. I've never understood why. My mother says he was afraid. For us. For me." Daniel's mouth twisted. "He never spoke of it again. He just got smaller. Every year he got a little smaller."
Blessing felt her eyes sting. "I'm so sorry."
"I never had proof. I only had a feeling. A feeling isn't evidence." He reached into his bag and took out his phone. His thumb moved over it, and then he held it out. "Until Wednesday."
She read the clipping slowly. She read the date. She read the line at the end, the Chief's careful sentence about a good man who made a mistake. Her breath caught.
"Nine days," she whispered.
"Nine days. They said the accounts were riddled with discrepancies on the fifth. On the fourteenth, they told the public everything was clean." He leaned back. "One of those statements is a lie. And I think I know which."
"This is evidence."
"It's the start of evidence. It proves they contradicted themselves. It doesn't prove why." He turned to her. "But it means I'm not crazy. It means the story I grew up with has a crack in it."
"Daniel..."
"And it means you were right to tell me." He said it plainly. "If the Chief knows I'm looking, then someone in that records office told him. Which means I have less time than I thought."
"What are you going to do?"
"Keep digging. Carefully." His eyes were steady, the cold pilot light burning quietly behind them. "And you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Kolade sent that photograph to frighten you. To make you doubt me." He paused. "Did it work?"
She thought about it honestly. About the long hours in the lab, the dinner at Iya Basira's, the plain grey sentence in the library: You don't have to wear it in here. About a boy who had spent twelve years carrying a secret and had never once asked her to carry it for him.
"No," she said. "It made me angry."
"At me?"
"At him. For thinking I'd be that easy to turn."
Daniel smiled. It was small, crooked, and more tired than any smile she had ever seen on him, and it made her heart turn over.
"Then I should tell you that Bisola found me on Tuesday," she said, a little breathlessly, because she needed to say something. "She warned me about him. She says he's been controlling her for two years. That he reads her messages, pays her friends to report on her, calls her lecturers."
"Do you believe her?"
"I don't know. Part of me thinks she's bitter." She hesitated. "But part of me recognised every word."
Daniel nodded slowly. "Then we should find out which part is right."
"We?"
"Yes. We." He reached across the desk. His fingers hesitated an inch from hers, and then, very gently, closed around them. His hand was warm, ink-stained, and entirely steady. "I'm not going to tell you what to think. I'll help you check. And whatever we find, I'm here."
She did not pull away. She turned her hand over under his, and held on.
For a minute, the humming tube was the only sound in the room.
"Is this the part where Emeka walks in?" she asked, her voice not quite steady.
"Almost certainly."
The door banged open. "I have noodles!" Emeka announced, holding up a plastic bag. He stopped. He looked at their hands. He looked at their faces. "Oh, wow. I'll just go and stand outside for ten minutes."
"Emeka."
"I'm already gone."
In Room 14, Tolu lay on the lower bunk with her laptop open on her stomach and her eyes on the ceiling.
It was twenty minutes past midnight. The bunk above her was empty. It had been empty most evenings that week. Blessing came in late, quiet, smelling faintly of dust and cold air, and climbed up the ladder without speaking. Sometimes she smiled at her phone in the dark. Tolu had caught her at it twice.
She did not ask. She had been trying not to ask for nine days.
I'm sorry, she had typed on Monday night. She had stared at the words for a long time. Then she had deleted them, and typed, Hope the lab is fun, and deleted that too.
She did not know how to be sorry for what she had said without being sorry for what she had meant.
In the corridor, a door banged. Favour's voice drifted in, muffled and amused. "She's out again. That girl is never home. I swear, ever since that Computer Science boy..."
"It's not like that," Tolu called.
"Okay o."
Tolu pulled her pillow over her face and breathed in cotton and detergent. It was ridiculous. She was a grown woman. She was Blessing's friend. She had held her hand through the worst week of her life, she had fought boys on the cafeteria steps, she had waited at a locked door until one a.m.
And she felt invisible.
She remembered an afternoon in first year when Blessing had burst into this room, face bright, saying Tolu, Tolu, guess what. Back then, Tolu had been the first person she told everything. Her secrets, her successes, her fears. They had lain on this very floor, eating Indomie from one pot, talking until the generator died.
Now, if there was a first person, it was somebody else.
She slid the pillow away and stared at the ceiling.
On the shelf, in the corner of her eye, the perfume bottle still stood where Blessing had left it, unopened. Tolu looked at it for a long time. She thought of the red dress, the emerald one, the photograph, the post, the men who watched Blessing from across rooms. She had warned her. She had been right. And being right had changed nothing at all.
I'm just jealous, she thought. That's all. I'm a jealous person.
She had said it to herself in a mirror, in the dark, a dozen times that week. The words had stopped sounding like a confession and started sounding like a diagnosis.
At 12:47, the door opened softly. Blessing slipped in. Their eyes met in the dim light.
"You're awake," Blessing said.
"Yes."
For a second, Tolu thought she might say something. Her mouth opened. Blessing waited, one hand on the ladder.
Then Tolu said, "Goodnight."
"Goodnight."
The bunk creaked. The room settled. Neither of them slept.
"There's something else."
It was Saturday morning, and Bisola had sent the message at seven. The old canteen behind the Faculty of Education. Eight o'clock. Please. I need to tell you one more thing.
They sat at a rusted table under a mango tree, with two cups of watery tea between them. The canteen was nearly empty. A cleaner swept dust from one corner to another. Bisola looked as though she had not slept.
"I wasn't sure if I should say this," she said. "I only found out two months ago. I've been trying to verify it ever since."
"Say what?"
"I'm not the only one."
Blessing's hand stopped halfway to her cup.
"Two years before me," Bisola said. "A girl named Adaeze Nnamdi. Law, 200 level at the time. I never met her. I only found out because her old roommate, a girl called Ngozi, recognised me at a church event and said, 'You're the one Kolade was dating, aren't you?' Like it was a condition." She turned the cup in her hands. "I asked her why she knew. She said Adaeze had dated him for a year. Same pattern. Gifts, then money, then rules."
"What happened to her?"
"Nobody knows." Bisola's voice dropped. "She left. Halfway through the second semester. She didn't sit her exams. She didn't tell her friends. One night, Ngozi came back to their room and half of Adaeze's things were gone. A suitcase. Her laptop. The next day, her Instagram was deleted. Her phone was off. The department said she'd 'withdrawn for personal reasons.' Her family didn't answer calls."
"Did anyone report it?"
"To whom? She was an adult. She'd cleaned out her own room." Bisola leaned forward. "But Ngozi told me one more thing. For weeks before she left, Adaeze kept saying the same sentence. She'd say it in her sleep. She'd say it to the wall. She said it to Ngozi the night before she disappeared."
"What sentence?"
"Please don't tell Kolade where I went."
The mango tree rattled in the wind. A pair of crows argued somewhere overhead. Blessing felt the temperature of her own skin drop.
"Where is she now?" she whispered.
"I don't know." Bisola held her gaze. "That's what I've been trying to find out for two months. And I've started to think I'll never get close enough on my own. Kolade has had his eye on me since the night I left. He has people. But you..." She stopped, and swallowed. "You're someone he trusts. You're someone he'll let near the places I can't reach."
"Bisola, I can't..."
"I'm not asking you to do anything tonight. I'm only asking you to look." Her eyes were bright. "Because if I'm right, it's not one girl, or two. It's a pattern. And you're standing in the middle of it."
Blessing's phone buzzed on the table.
She glanced at it without thinking. The name on the screen sent a quiet chill down her spine.
Kolade: Where are you? I'm outside Room 14. Tolu says you left at 7:30.
She had not told him where she was going. She had not told him anything.
Across the table, Bisola read the expression on her face, and did not need to ask.
"Yes," she said softly. "That's what it feels like."
END OF EPISODE 7
Next: Episode 8, "Best Friends Don't Do This."