Emeka pulled his chair closer.

“I’ve spent twenty years fixing electrical systems after factory fires, Ifeoma.

Trust me — I know how to recognize something that’s still carrying a current.” She wept then, silently, not from sadness but from a bone-deep exhaustion.

That afternoon he went back to the shop, picked up Obadiah’s thirty-million-dollar check, and tore it slowly into pieces.

He had meant the line about the current as comfort, but he found afterward that he believed it as an actual description of her.

He had spent his working life around electrical systems, and he had learned to read them by a sense that was almost physical — the ability to walk into a burned-out factory floor, past panels everyone else had written off as dead, and feel which lines were still live, still humming with power under the char.