Kojo ended the call without answering.
Outside the tinted window, little Adzo stood nervously in the heat, clutching the photograph tighter as expensive cars swerved impatiently around them.
“Where did you get this picture?” Kojo asked quietly.
The girl blinked.
“My mother.”
His chest tightened violently.
No.
Impossible.
Safa Antui had disappeared twelve years earlier.
The woman he once planned to marry.
The woman his family claimed stole millions from his father’s company before vanishing overnight.
The woman whose disappearance nearly ruined him.
And now—
her face was in the hands of an eleven-year-old girl begging beside a road.
Kojo opened the car door slowly.
His driver immediately turned in alarm.
“Sir?”
“Wait here.”
The humid Accra heat wrapped around him as he stepped onto the roadside.
Adzo instinctively stepped backward.
Rich men usually did not get out of their cars for children like her.
Kojo crouched carefully until he was eye-level with her.
“What’s your name?”
“Adzo.”
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
His throat tightened harder.
Eleven.
The exact timeline made his pulse start hammering.
“When was this photo taken?”
“Yesterday,” she answered softly. “At Korle Bu.”
Kojo stared at the picture again.
Safa looked weak.
Terribly weak.
But unmistakably alive.
A thousand memories hit him at once.
Safa laughing while rain flooded the market streets.
Safa asleep against his shoulder during university lectures.
Safa crying the night his father accused her of theft.
Then—
the last memory.
Her disappearing without explanation.
Without goodbye.
Without ever contacting him again.
Kojo swallowed hard.
“Who is your father?”
The question escaped before he could stop it.
Adzo lowered her eyes immediately.
“I don’t know.”
His blood ran cold.
The little girl quickly held up the photograph again.
“Please, sir,” she whispered desperately. “The hospital said they will stop her medicine if we don’t pay.”
Kojo stood very still.
Then he asked the question that shattered whatever calm remained inside him.
“What is your mother’s full name?”
“Safa Antui.”
His knees nearly gave out.
Because even after twelve years…
