Food included.
Those two words had stayed with him.
So he followed the rumor.
By the time the sun was high enough to turn the dirt road into something close to concrete, Tobenna had been walking for hours. The road was empty in both directions, the kind of emptiness that makes a man hear his own life too clearly. Dry grass leaned in from both sides. Heat shimmered above the path. Birds cried somewhere far away, but even they sounded tired.
He had forty naira in his pocket.
He had not eaten since the morning before.
In the plastic bag hanging from his left hand were everything he still owned: one change of clothes, a small Bible his mother had given him when he first left home, a notebook where he wrote down every coin he spent, and a pencil worn almost too short to hold.
The notebook was the one thing people laughed at when they saw it.
A homeless man writing expenses.
But Tobenna kept records.
He had not always lived like this.
Before hunger became a shape in his stomach, before he learned which market stalls threw away food after closing, before he discovered that sleeping on concrete teaches the body to wake before the sun, he had been a business owner in Mushin.
Small, yes.
But real.
Two motorcycles first.
Then a van.
Then three vans.
Toby Logistics.
He still remembered the name painted on the side of the first vehicle, blue letters on white metal, slightly crooked because he had paid a sign painter half price and bought him lunch as part of the bargain.
He had delivered goods for market women, spare-parts dealers, small online sellers, bakeries, wholesalers, and the kinds of businesses the bigger logistics firms ignored because they did not look profitable enough on paper.
Tobenna made them profitable by caring about the details.
He knew which traders needed morning deliveries and which ones could not pay until Friday. He knew which roads flooded after thirty minutes of rain. He knew which drivers lied about fuel and which ones only needed a second chance because their children were sick. He kept manifests like scripture. He believed order was not just a business practice, but a moral position.
The right package.
The right route.
The right timing.
He used to tell his drivers, “If the order is wrong, the whole route suffers.”
Then, slowly and completely, he proved himself right.
The third van came too early.
That was the truth.
He could blame the economy. He could blame clients. He could blame the large firm that came into the area and undercut his prices. He could blame the loan officer who smiled too confidently. He could blame fuel costs, police checkpoints, delayed payments, bad luck, and timing.
All of those things were real.
But the deepest truth was simpler.
He bought the third van before the client base was strong enough to carry it.
He took the loan when hope looked too much like math.
Then three major clients left in the same month.
To service the debt, he sold two vans.
Without the vans, he lost capacity.
Without capacity, he lost the remaining clients.
