Adaeze Traded Her Only Inheritance to Send Him Across the Sea — He Returned Home With Another Woman on His Arm

Chapter 5

“I didn’t sell my land so that you could buy me a new one, Emeka.”

He blinked. “Adaeze —”

“I sold it because I believed in you. Because I believed that *we* — the two of us — were worth more than nine rows of cassava and three mango trees.” Her voice rose, cracked, steadied. “I did not do it as an investment. I did it as a love letter. And a love letter is not something you pay back. It’s something you answer.”

He sat very still, the folder between them like a fence neither of them knew how to climb.

“I came back,” he said at last, “for you. Not for the business. Not for the land. I came back to answer you. I just didn’t know how to say it without showing you that I hadn’t wasted what you gave me. I was so afraid you’d look at my hands and see the dishwashing and think — think you’d made a mistake.”

“Your hands.” Adaeze looked down at his hands, resting flat on the table. “You think I’m ashamed of your hands? Emeka, I have watched your hands hold a book, hold a child, hold me. I have waited two years for those hands to hold me again. I did not wait for a deed.”

She left the folder on the table and went to stand by the window, looking out at the yard where Mama Nkechi sat shelling beans, pretending very hard to be deaf.

Behind her, she heard him stand. She heard him walk around the table. She heard him stop a careful arm’s length away, and she could feel the heat of him, and the fear, and the terrible hope.

“I don’t want your land back,” she said to the window. “I want you to tell me the truth. All of it. Who is that woman, Emeka? And why did she have your hand?”

The door — which neither of them had locked — opened.

A woman’s voice, gentle and accented, said: “I can answer that.”

Adaeze turned.

Kemi stood in the doorway, sunlight behind her turning her dress to a deeper wine. She looked smaller than she had at the airport — less a threat and more a guest, carrying a basket of oranges and an expression of genuine, careful apology.

“May I come in?” she asked. “I was going to wait, but I heard you ask. And you deserve the answer from me, not from him.”

Adaeze looked at Emeka. He nodded. Kemi stepped inside and set the basket on the table, next to the folder, and then she did something that made Adaeze’s whole understanding of the morning tilt on its axis.

She held up her left hand.

A wedding ring caught the light — a thin gold band, well worn, well loved.

Adaeze stared at it. “You’re married?”