The last van was repossessed on a Tuesday morning while he stood in the compound and watched it go.
No shouting.
No drama.
Just two men with papers, a tow hook, and the kind of indifference that follows a lawful thing done without mercy.
That evening, he came home to find Amaka sitting at the kitchen table.
Her hands were flat against the surface.
He knew that posture.
It meant she had already decided something and was waiting for him to arrive so the decision could become spoken.
“I can’t do this anymore, Toby,” she said.
Their daughter, Chisom, was asleep in the next room.
Tobenna looked toward the door.
“Amaka…”
“I tried.”
Those two words hurt more than blame would have.
She took Chisom and went to Aba.
He paid the last month on the flat, packed what he could carry, and walked out.
That was fourteen months ago.
In fourteen months, he had not stolen anything.
Not when hunger made his mouth fill with bitterness.
Not when unattended phones sat on market counters.
Not when wallets peeked from open bags.
Not when he slept outside shops and watched people drop more money on snacks than he had seen in a week.
It was not because he was holy.
It was not because temptation never came.
It was because a man has to know where he ends before the world starts writing over him.
Tobenna had lost his business, his flat, his wife, his daily place in his daughter’s life, and the simple dignity of waking up under a roof that belonged to him.
But he had not lost his line.
Some people bend when life presses them.
Some break.
Some twist themselves into whatever shape survival demands.
Tobenna had been built straight.
The years had not managed to bend him.
He did not know, walking that empty road in Ogen State with forty naira and hunger in his bones, that the world was about to test that line in the most direct way it ever had.
The bags appeared without warning.
Four black bags scattered across the dirt road as if they had fallen from the sky.
At first, Tobenna thought they were luggage.
Then he saw the split seam on one of them.
Then he saw what was inside.
Bundled notes.
Dollars.
Not naira.
Dollars.
Stacks wrapped tightly, clean and heavy, the kind of money that does not look real until you have no money of your own.
He stopped walking.
The sun pressed against the back of his neck.
