Chapter Twenty-two: Run, Tammy, Run.
Location; Ikoyi. Time: 11:30 am.
Tammy didn't remember grabbing her hoodie. She didn't remember slipping into her slides or snatching her emergency backpack from under the stairs. All she knew was that her legs were moving very fast. The second Rita's words settled in her brain…"Jeremy is coming for you. He thinks you did everything" her world cracked down the middle.
It was like the air had gone poisonous. The walls of Jeremy's luxury home, which once felt like a weird, glitzy fairy tale, now caved in on her like a trap. She couldn't even think. All she knew was: Get out. Disappear. Now.
She slipped through the back garden, dodging the staff quarters, her heart in her throat. The press had been camped at the front gate all day, hungry vultures with mics and camera drones, throwing around words like "fake marriage", "con," and "CEO's scandal." The last thing she needed was to be spotted on CCTV looking like a suspect who had something to hide, that would just make everything much more worse than it already was.
She kept running. Took a cab and stopped near a black gate. Entered and continued running.
And didn't stop until she got to the hidden location Rita had scouted weeks ago "just in case." A tiny serviced apartment downtown. Cheap, undetectable, and cash-only. They'd joked about it then because it was Rita's first ever apartment that wasn't more then 2.5 million naira. It wasn't funny now.
By the time she slammed the door shut, her legs gave out. She crumbled to the floor.
"I didn't do anything," she whispered, her voice raw. "I didn't..."
Rita appeared beside her giving her water and sitting on the floor placing Tammy's head on her chest while stroking her hair. "We know. Tammy, we know. But right now, you have to breathe. We've got work to do."
Tammy sighed and rested on Rita's chest thinking about all that happened today.
After she thought she could catch her breath, the next thing she heard was Rita barging in this afternoon when she was trying to make food after going to Jeremy's office earlier in the morning about the mass. Well, she was escorted out of his office. And as for Rita, she said Wale told her that Jeremy was on his way today to get her. As he had made up his mind totally that she wasn't innocent. She quickly told the maids and staff to go back to the staff quarters and started her packing.
---
Meanwhile, at the Vire mansion, all hell had broken loose.
Jeremy was pacing the length of his father's old study. Zion was on the phone cross-checking security footage from the hotel. Wale had just returned from a failed search at Tammy's parents' home, and Tobi was firing off emails to their PR team.
"She ran," Jeremy muttered, fists clenched. "Why would she run if she's innocent?"
Zion looked up. "Maybe because a mob of reporters just called her a con artist and a gold-digger on national TV?"
Jeremy's jaw tensed. "She should've talked to me. And I would've listened!!"
"Listened? Like hell you would've. She tried, bro," Tobi said from the couch. "Remember? She came to the office. You told security to turn her away. Or in nicer words, escort her out."
That shut him up.
"Still doesn't explain how all this started," Wale said. "That fake account, the hotel incident, those doctored videos—someone planted this to look like she orchestrated everything. Or maybe she did, I mean it all points at that."
"Until we know who did it, she looks guilty," Zion said grimly.
Jeremy didn't respond. He just looked at his phone, staring at her contact photo—the one where she was laughing mid-eye-roll during a game night weeks ago. His heart squeezed.
---
Tammy barely slept that night. Her laptop hummed beside her as she dove deep into the black web.
Every firewall she hacked into, every private server she accessed, only made her more certain: someone powerful had fabricated the narrative.
She found breadcrumbs. Masked IP addresses. Cloud storage files with falsified timestamps. Hotel records that had been wiped, then rewritten. Even Tony Balogun's name popped up again.
She rubbed her temples.
"This was a setup," she whispered. "From the start."
"But who?" Anjii asked from behind her, arms crossed, eyes sharp. "We need a list."
"I already have one," Tammy muttered, eyes narrowing as she opened a classified spreadsheet on her encrypted drive. "And I'm gonna cross each name off until I find the bastard who did this. Because like I said befor, Tayo is way too stupid to be this smart."
---
In public, however, the Viré family was doing major damage control.
Jeremy's mother, Madam Adesewa, sat on Good Morning Lagos, wearing a flawless peach gele and a smile that did not reach her eyes.
"My son and his wife are very happy," she said. "This is simply... media noise. They're young. Let them breathe."
Next was Grandma Adeola—regal and untouched by the chaos. She spoke in clipped Yoruba on a cultural radio show:
"People forget that marriage is not for Instagram. My grandson and his wife are real people. If my granddaughter-in-law is not in public right now, perhaps it is because she is tired of being a circus animal. Let her rest."
But none of it silenced the questions:
Where is Tammy?
Why did she run?
Was it all a scam from the start?
---
Back at the safe house, Tammy was unraveling the plot piece by piece.
"She's not okay," Rita said quietly, watching Tammy hunched over her laptop like a soldier at war. "She's not eating, not sleeping—just coding."
"Let her work," Anjii said. "This is how she survives."
Tammy paused only to send out digital lures—programmed bugs and baits to fish out the one who manipulated their lives. She created false leads and backdoors, forcing the real villain's hand.
"If I stay here long enough," she whispered, "they'll come to me."
And they would.
Because Tammy wasn't the victim anymore.
She was the trap.