Six months Later.
The old office was gone.
Amaka didn't mourn it. Legacy wasn't in brick or branding—it lived in what you carried forward. And she had carried forward only what mattered: her vision, her voice, and the man who walked beside her when everything else fell apart.
The new studio was smaller, messier. Part art space, part digital lab. And completely theirs.
They called it Studio Bold.
No soft rebrand. No apologies. Just ambition, laid bare.
Amaka sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by prototypes—interactive art pieces that turned human stories into visual maps. One wall glowed with digital threads connecting pain, joy, and memory.
She'd turned survival into data. Vulnerability into strategy. Beauty into something measurable.
Rita entered, holding coffee. "The beta test waitlist crossed 8,000."
Amaka blinked. "We launched the sign-up this morning."
Rita smirked. "Turns out people do want truth. Who knew?"
They both laughed. Healing had made space for friendship again.
Tunde returned that evening from a school exhibition in Surulere, his hands speckled with charcoal, his voice light.
"You should've seen the girl who drew Lagos with her left hand and drew her late father's face with her right. Said she didn't want to choose between memory and movement."
"That's poetry," Amaka said.
"It's power," Tunde replied. "She's nine."
He kissed her temple. "Come outside."
She followed him to the rooftop, barefoot, quiet.
The sun was slipping past the edges of the buildings like it, too, was tired of being watched. The sky—painted with the same hue as the first night they met—stretched wide.
"I have something for you," he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
Tunde reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, folded piece of canvas.
Not a ring.
A sketch.
Her—standing in front of a burning city, hands open, heart exposed. And above her: a sky, stitched with scars and light.
Underneath it, he had written:
"She did not borrow the sky. She remade it."
Amaka blinked back tears. "You're such a dramatic man."
"I only draw what's true."
They stood together in the golden hush.
The city below them still roared. Still doubted. Still tried to box them into something smaller than what they'd become.
But they were done asking for space.
They were claiming it.
Together.
Not perfect.
Not unbroken.
But real.
And that, finally, was enough.