She didn't sleep.
She sat with her laptop until four in the morning, scrolling through phone-camera photos of the memorial outside the courthouse—candles covering the pavement, handwritten notes taped over Juma's face on the wall. The house was dead quiet. In the blue light of the screen, the vast, empty living room felt less like a home and more like an archive. Somewhere past two, she stopped watching the news and searched through her own memories instead. The rooftop above Juma's family apartment, the summer she turned nineteen. Late light turning the smoke over Nairobi gold. Juma had brought two warm sodas and a secondhand guitar with a split down the back.
They sat with their legs hanging over the ledge, arguing over whether songs actually changed anything. Dalia had laughed at him. "I'm serious," Juma said, picking at a loose string. "Every movement that ever mattered had a song attached to it. Facts make people nod. Music makes them move."
"That's a nice theory," she said. "It's history," he said, offering that half-crooked grin. "You've got a voice people listen to, Dalia. One day you'll have to decide what you're doing with it."
"You make everything sound like a debt."
"Maybe some things are."
Dalia pulled the small wooden bird from her pocket—a carving from her mother, its edges worn smooth by a decade of her thumb against the wood.
"My mother used to say fire has two faces," Dalia said, looking at the smooth cedar instead of him. "It can guide you home, or it can burn the house down."
"Both, probably," Juma said, reaching out to take the carving. He turned it in the fading light before closing her hand back around it. "That's why it matters. Something that can do either depending on how you carry it—that's worth being brave about."
She hadn't believed him then. Not then, and not through the ten years of arenas that followed. Four hours before dawn, sitting alone with the glow of a paused video still lighting her face, she found herself wondering, seriously, whether he'd been right after all. She rose and crossed to the small locked drawer where she kept the handful of things she'd brought from Kenya and never displayed for visitors. Beneath a stack of old photographs she rarely allowed herself to look at, she found the carving. Her mother had made it the year before she died, whittling it during the long evenings after the county's water authority rerouted the river that had once run clean through their neighborhood. The replacement water had come from somewhere near the mining operations upstream. No one in government ever explained it.
Dalia was seventeen when her mother died. The death certificate—which took four months and borrowed money to obtain—listed the cause as "waterborne illness." The words had never felt like an explanation. Dalia held the wooden bird, her thumb rubbing over its worn back. The decision was already made. Maybe it had been made the second Toni called her in the dressing room. Around two in the morning, a notification popped up in a private account Dalia rarely checked. A video file, no caption, sent from a handle she didn't know.
She tapped play.
Zuri filled the screen. Up close, in a cramped room lit by a single desk lamp, she looked even younger—and far more exhausted. "I don't know if this will reach you," Zuri said into the camera. "I got this address through someone who worked with Juma. I'm sorry if it's an intrusion." She looked away briefly before meeting the lens again.
"Juma talked about you. More than you probably know. He kept every song you ever released, Dalia. Even after you stopped calling. Whenever a new track came out, he'd play it for everyone in the office first thing in the morning. Nobody was allowed to speak until we listened."
Zuri offered a faint, tired smile. "He was so damn proud of you." Zuri's voice cracked slightly, then steadied with visible effort. "I don't know if that girl is even still in there somewhere. But if she is-we need her. Not the fame." Zuri looked directly into the camera. "We need the person Juma loved."
A long pause.
When Zuri spoke again, the fierceness had left her voice. "He would have wanted you here," she said. "Not for the movement. For him."
The video ended.
Dalia sat with it for a moment, then did the smallest thing she could think to do that was still, a real action rather than another private feeling.
She typed a reply.
I got this. I don't know yet what I'm going to do. But I got it, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't. She sent it before she could talk herself out of the admission it contained-that ignoring Zuri, after this, was no longer something she could do without consciously choosing to. She sat for a long time with the glow of the laptop filling the darkened living room. Then she reached for her phone. She opened a flight app she hadn't used in years and tapped the destination field. Her thumb hovered over the screen. She thought about the girl on the rooftop. Nineteen. Barefoot. Absolutely certain a song could change something. Maybe that girl had never disappeared. Maybe she'd only gone quiet beneath the contracts, the interviews, the tours, the careful choices that came with becoming Dalia Njeri.
Her thumb touched the screen.
Nairobi.
As if love for a place expired simply because you'd left it. As if years away could stamp CANCELLED across the word home. Los Angeles came up gray outside her bedroom window. Dalia hadn't slept. She had no plan for Nairobi, no speech prepared for Barnaby, and nothing ready for the reporters waiting at the gate. The label, the press, the whole machinery around her—none of it had a clear next move. She just needed to get to Juma's memorial in four days. Everything else could wait.
At six in the morning, Dalia called Priya. "Good morning Priya. Listen carefully, I need a flight to Nairobi. Today, if possible. And cancel Thursday—Vogue, all of it."
"I pulled up flight options an hour ago," Priya said, her voice dry over the speaker. "I wasn't sure you'd actually call, but I knew where you'd end up." She caught herself. "Dalia, that shoot's been locked for four months. The creative director's flying in from Milan tomorrow. If we drop out now, people are going to talk."
"Let them."
Silence on the line.
"Today?" Priya asked. "I can set up security and transport for tomorrow evening, but today is—"
"Today," Dalia said. "I know it's sudden. I know it throws everything into a wall, Bottom line, I need to go. Barnaby will know how to clean things up."
"It's not just a mess, Dalia. It's my job," Priya said. "If Barnaby thinks I lost control of your schedule, I'm the one who answers for it. You get to fly off and do brave things while I stay here and deal with whatever's left."
Dalia looked out the window at the gray morning light. "You're right. I should've asked instead of assuming."
"Do you want out? If you don't want your name attached to this, just say so. I'll find another way to book it. You can step back."
"That's not what I said," Priya said, exhaling sharply into the receiver. "It isn't free for me, but I'm still doing it."
"Good, because I'm done answering to a calendar that was never mine anyway."
"I saw the footage from Nairobi," Priya said quietly. "I've been watching it for two days, wondering if you'd seen it. If I should say something."
"Why didn't you?"
"I didn't think it was my place."
"Maybe it was."
"I think you're doing the right thing, Dalia. Whatever else happens today."
"Thank you, Priya," Dalia said. "That means a lot."
She sat for a long moment in the morning sunlight shining in. She picked up her laptop and began to scroll.
Priya called back.
"He already knows," she said.
Dalia stopped.
"The airline flagged the reservation. Barnaby has alerts set on anything booked under your name." Priya paused. "He's called me four times in the last ten minutes."
"Don't answer."
"I haven't."
Another pause.
"He's on his way to your house."
Dalia went still.
"How do you know?"
"Because he's leaving voicemail."
Dalia looked toward the front windows.
"I thought you'd want to know before he was standing at your door."
He arrived within the hour, his usual composure already beginning to crack.
"You can't do this. I've already spoken to the label. Legal is reviewing your contract as we speak."
Dalia stared at him. "My contract?"
"The morality clause."
He stepped closer, lowering his voice.
"You get on that plane, I can't promise there's still an album when you come back."
Dalia said nothing.
"Or a tour. Or much of anything we've spent the last ten years building."
"Then don't promise it."
"You're not thinking clearly. Grief doesn't make good decisions, and you're currently running entirely on grief."
His voice caught slightly. She'd never heard Barnaby afraid before.
"I'm thinking more clearly than I have in a decade," Dalia said. "I need you to hear me, Barnaby. Not just wait for me to stop talking so you can explain why I'm wrong."
He stood there, no answer waiting.
"I'm still going," Dalia said.
Barnaby looked at her.
"With or without your approval. I'd rather have it."
She held his gaze.
"But I'm not waiting for it. I'll be traveling light, no stylist, no wardrobe plan, no assistant laying out options across the bed. Just a few changes of clothes, the wooden bird, and whatever else I can fit into a single suitcase."
Barnaby looked at her puzzled. "Wooden bird?"
"See, you really don't understand."
She was going home. Suitcase in hand, she closed the front door behind her.