The conversation had been building for months.Elian had felt it in the Saturday visits — the accumulation of ordinary talk about football tactics and Amara's stories and the street network and Femi's server architecture, the way Dayo participated in all of it with the engaged intelligence of a fourteen-year-old discovering that his father was a person rather than a category. He had felt it in the specific quality of silence that Dayo carried in the final twenty minutes of each visit, the silence of someone holding something that was not yet ready to be said but was becoming more ready each week.He did not push it.He had learned — from the corner table, from the accounts that required patience, from eighteen months of building things that only worked at the speed of trust — that pushing produced performance rather than truth. Truth arrived when it was ready. His job was to be present when it did.It arrived on the fourth Saturday of October.Amara had gone early — she had a reading