Pages 95 & 96

While the foundations of Abena’s resolve were crumbling in the salt air of Tema, Kwesi Dankwa was rebuilding himself from the inside out. In the dead of night at the Ashanti Central Prison, the computer lab was his only world. The blue light of the monitors reflected in his eyes, which had grown accustomed to searching for patterns in shadows.

He had moved far beyond simple spreadsheets. He had finished his chartered banking modules and was now deep into specialised online courses in Criminology and Police Science. He devoured digital copies of forensic manuals and criminal psychology texts. He spent his few free hours with the well-worn adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the elegant thievery of Arsène Lupin. From Holmes, he learned the power of the minute detail, the way a single registration number could bring down a fleet. From Lupin, he learned the necessity of the mask, that to obtain justice, one sometimes had to master the art of the deceptive shadow.

But this was not a pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Every line of code he wrote, every case study he analysed, was a weapon forged for a single purpose.

“Evidence,” he whispered to the empty room, his fingers dancing across the keyboard. “I just need the one link they couldn’t burn.”

His sole motivation, the engine that drove him to study until his eyes burned and his head throbbed, was Abena. In his mind, she was still the woman in the yellow batik house-dress, waiting under the mango tree in Patasi. He didn’t see the erosion; he saw only a finish line. Every banking protocol he decrypted was a step closer to clearing his name. Every criminology theory he mastered was a brick in the house they would eventually build.

He had calculated his “release” not in terms of twenty years, but in terms of the moment he could finally stand before her as an innocent man.

“I will get out,” he promised his reflection in the dark screen. “I will find the truth, I will take back my life, and I will marry her. They can lock me in this cell, but they cannot keep me from her.”

He kept a small, crumpled piece of paper hidden in his shoe, the original “Knocking” list he had started that first year. He had added more notes now, cross-referencing his banking knowledge with the names of shell companies he suspected Kojo and Jude were using. He was becoming a forensic master, a digital hunter preparing to strike from the dark.

He closed his eyes for a moment, imagining her smile, the crinkle at the corners of her eyes. That image was his sanctuary, the only thing that kept the prison walls from crushing his soul. He didn’t know about the tilapia dinners in Community 11. He didn’t know that the woman he was forging himself for was already looking at the “cousin” who was always there.

As the fourth year of his sentence drew to a close, Kwesi Dankwa was a man on the verge of an intellectual breakthrough, fuelled by a love he believed was as immovable as the earth. He was sharpening his mind into a blade, ready to cut through the institutional wall, unaware that the heart he was fighting to return to was already slipping through his fingers.