Chapter 484: The Deadline
Faye dressed like she was going to a funeral. Black trousers, a gray shirt buttoned to the collar, no jewelry. She looked in the mirror of her apartment and practiced her speech. ’I am not quitting. I am not coming home. I have a contract and a plan and I will see it through whether you pay for it or not.’ She had been rehearsing these lines for three weeks, ever since her father summoned her and gave her the ultimatum: produce results or return to the family business.
She expected shouting. She expected him to have hired a new accountant to prove that ninety percent of musicians fail. She expected him to bring up the tuition he had paid for her business degree, the connections he had offered, the respectable future she was throwing away for a microphone and a dream. Her sister, Zara, had called three times that morning. Faye ignored every ring. She needed to stay angry. Anger was the only thing that had kept her from crying in front of him before.
The drive to Ikoyi took forty minutes through Lagos traffic that moved like molasses. Her father’s office sat above a shipping yard he owned, a building that smelled like diesel and authority. She climbed the stairs with her chin up, ready for war.
He received her in his study. Not the dining room where family arguments happened, with the loud voices and the slammed doors. The study, with its dark wood and its air of final decisions. He was already seated when she entered. He did not stand. He just looked at her with the same steady gaze he used on contractors who tried to overcharge him.
"Sit," he said.
She sat.
He poured her water from a glass jug. His hands were steady. He slid the glass across the desk. She did not touch it. She was waiting for him to start shouting, to wave a report, to threaten to cut her off from the family accounts.
Instead, he opened a drawer. He took out a photograph. He slid it across the desk.
Faye picked it up. A young man stood in front of a microphone, holding a guitar. The photo was old, the colors faded to sepia at the edges. The young man wore flared trousers and a shirt with a collar wide enough to land a plane. He was grinning. He looked free.
Faye stared at the face. It took her a full ten seconds to recognize it. The cheekbones. The set of the jaw. The eyes.
"This is you," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted.
"1987," her father said. "I was twenty-two. I played at the Fela Shrine. I played at Joromi. I had a band called The Green Eagles, which tells you how little I understood about branding." He leaned back in his chair. "I was good, Faye. Not great. But good enough to think I could be great."
Faye felt the floor shift under her feet. She had spent her entire life believing her father was a man born to spreadsheets and shipping manifests. She had never seen him touch a guitar. She had never heard him hum. He had never attended a concert with her, never asked about her playlists, never shown any sign that music meant anything to him except noise and wasted potential.
"You wanted to be a musician," she said. It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation, but it lacked the heat she had planned. She was too stunned to process the information talk less of to be angry.
"I was a musician," he said. "For three years. I played every club in Lagos that would have me. I slept in borrowed rooms. I ate once a day when I was lucky. I made one recording. One. At a studio in Yaba that smelled like urine and hope. The engineer was drunk and the tape had a hiss in the left channel that sounded like a snake. I pressed two hundred copies and sold eleven. The rest sat in a cupboard until termites ate them."
Faye looked down at the photograph. The young man with the guitar looked nothing like the man across the desk from her. That young man was soft. Open. The man in front of her was granite and caution.
"Why didn’t you tell me?" she asked.
"Because I failed." He said it flatly. "Because I watched your mother drain herself slowly and I realized I had nothing to give her but debt and a name no one knew you were in the picture at that time a newborn. Because your grandfather called me home and told me the shipping business needed a man, not a guitar player. And because I was terrified, Faye. I was terrified that if I let you try, you would end up exactly where I did. Or worse."
He stood up. He walked to the window and looked down at the yard where men were loading crates onto trucks. Faye had never seen him pace before. He was always still, always planted.
"The Nigerian industry is not kind to women," he said. "You know this. I know this. I have watched girls with more talent than I ever had get chewed up by producers who wanted more than music. By contracts that turned them into property. By an audience that loved them for six months and forgot them in seven. I had the money to sponsor you. I could have bought you a studio, a producer, a launch party in London. But I knew what the money could not buy. It could not buy you safety. It could not buy you respect. It could not buy you a career that outlasts your youth."
Faye felt tears burning. She blinked them back. She would not cry in front of him. Not yet. Not until she understood what she was crying for.
"So you tried to stop me," she said.
"I tried to make you strong enough that if you still chose this after I said no, you would survive it. The deadline was never real, Faye. It was a test. If you came back today with your tail between your legs, I would have known you did not want it enough. But if you came back ready to fight..." He turned from the window. "Then I would know you were serious. And I would know that maybe, this time, with the right protection, the right label, the right people around you..... maybe you would not end up like me."
Faye stood up. Her legs felt unsteady. She walked to the desk and set the photograph down with trembling fingers.
"You were scared," she said.
"I still am."
"Of what? I have a contract. JD Records is real. Dayo—" She said with reassurance after all she had heard and seen Dayo’s artist both in US and does in Asian and he treated them good.
"Dayo is a man with a thousand problems you do not see," her father said. "And JD Records is a machine, and machines do not love you. I am scared of the same things I was scared of in 1987. But I am also old enough to know that I cannot choose your battles for you. I can only choose whether to let you fight them alone."
He reached into his drawer again. This time he took out an envelope. He held it out to her.
"What is this?"
"The sponsorship I should have offered three years ago. Not enough to make you lazy. Enough to make sure you are not hungry. Enough to make sure that if JD Records has a bad quarter, you still have a floor beneath you. Take it. Or don’t. But I am telling you today, with no deadline and no ultimatum, that I believe you are serious. And I believe you are talented. And I am sorry that I made you think I was your enemy when I was only ever a man who failed and did not want his daughter to feel the same But beyond all of this if you are tired or want to retire home is always open to you your mum and i would gladly take you back without question."
Faye took the envelope. It was heavier than she expected. She looked at her father and saw, for the first time, not the man who had blocked her, but the man who had hidden his own broken guitar in a drawer and pretended he had never wanted to sing.
"I need to go," she said.
"Go where?"
"To work. I have a single to plan."
He nodded. "Then go."
She walked to the door. She stopped with her hand on the handle. "What was your song called? The one you recorded?"
Her father was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Folasade."
Faye felt the name hit her chest. Her own name. She did not turn around. She could not, because if she did, she would cry, and she was not ready for that yet. She just nodded and walked out.
Zara was waiting in the car outside. She saw Faye’s face and her own went pale. "What happened? Did he shout? Are you cut off?"
Faye got into the passenger seat and stared at the dashboard. "He wanted to be a musician," she said. "He recorded a song named after me. He was scared. All this time, he wasn’t trying to crush me. He was trying to protect me from failing the way he did."
Zara stared at her. Then she reached across and took Faye’s hand. "I tried to tell you. Years ago. Remember? I said he was harder on you because you were the only one of us who reminded him of himself."
"I thought you meant business."
"I meant music. He told me once, when I was twelve after i saw the picture in his room . He made me swear never to tell you. He said if you knew he had failed, you would pity him. And if you pitied him, you would not fear him. And if you did not fear him, you would not work hard enough to survive what was coming."
She said nothing but hug her sister and waved her goodbye.
Faye leaned her head back against the seat. The Lagos heat pressed against the windows. She felt emptied out, like someone had drained the anger that had been her fuel for years and left her hollow. She did not know what filled that space yet. But she knew it was not nothing.
"Take me to this studio," she said.
The drive across the bridge took an hour. Faye did not speak. She held the envelope in her lap and watched the city scroll past. The street vendors. The buses packed with people. The endless, grinding, beautiful chaos of Lagos. Her father had tried to keep her from this. Not because he hated it. Because he had loved it once, and it had eaten him alive.
The JD Records studio was in a converted warehouse in Lekki, a building that had once held textiles and now held sound. Faye had been there twice before, both times for meetings where producers had asked her about her influences and she had lied because she was too guarded to tell the truth. Today felt different.
She walked through the front door and heard the noise immediately. Not chaos. Work. The sound of creation happening in separate rooms, separate minds, all aimed at the same impossible target.
In the main room, Frosh sat on a couch with headphones around his neck, nodding to a beat that leaked from the speakers. He was writing in a notebook, lips moving silently, testing rhymes. He looked up when Faye entered and gave her a half-wave, already sinking back into whatever he was building.
In the corner, Akin and Jinad huddled over a mixing board, arguing about a snare sound. Akin wanted it tighter. Jinad wanted it to breathe. They were both sweating in the air-conditioned room, bent over the console like surgeons over a patient. They did not look up.
This was the factory her father had feared. Not because it was cruel, but because it was hungry. It consumed people who were not ready. And for the first time, Faye understood that she had spent years thinking she was ready when really she had just been angry.
She walked to the small rehearsal room at the back. It had a keyboard, a microphone, and a window that looked out at nothing but a brick wall. She sat at the keyboard. She did not play her father’s song. She did not play anything she had written before.
She put her fingers on the keys and thought about the photograph. The young man with the guitar. The song called Folasade. The fear that had disguised itself as hardness.
She played a chord. Then another. It was simple, just a progression, but it felt honest in a way her previous work had not. She began to hum. No words yet. Just melody. A conversation between the person she had been this morning and the person she was becoming.
Through the window in the door, she could see Frosh still writing, still nodding. Akin and Jinad had reached a compromise on the snare. The girl with purple braids had moved from scales to a melody of her own.
Faye closed her eyes. She was no longer running from an enemy at home. She was no longer proving anything to anyone except herself. Her father had given her his blessing, his money, and his broken dream. Now she had to decide if she was strong enough to carry all three.
She played on. The song was not finished. It might not be finished for weeks. But when she finally opened her eyes, the room had gone dark outside the window, and her fingers were stiff, and she had something on the page that had not been there before.
A beginning.
Not a rebellion. Just music.