Her Son Asked Why Daddy Slept in Another Woman’s Room — Then She Discovered Her Husband and Her Helper Were Plotting to Take Her Home
Chapter 1
“Mummy, why does daddy sleep in Aunty Blessing’s room during the day?”
Ijeoma’s hands went still over the basket of laundry, the folded shirt slipping from her fingers back into the pile. The living room, ordinarily so familiar, suddenly felt like a stranger’s house around her.
“What did you just say, Tobenna?” she asked, keeping her voice as level as she could manage.
“Daddy goes into Aunty Blessing’s room when you go to work,” her four-year-old son said simply, pushing a toy car across the tiled floor without looking up. “He locks the door. He says he’s resting. But why doesn’t he rest in your room instead?”
A cold, sharp ache spread through Ijeoma’s chest. Children that age didn’t invent details like locked doors and daytime naps out of nowhere. They only reported, plainly and without agenda, exactly what they’d seen.
Blessing was the young woman Ijeoma had brought from her husband’s home village six months earlier to help around the house and with Tobenna, a girl she’d clothed, fed, and treated with genuine warmth, the way an older sister might treat a younger one. And Chuka, her husband of five years, the man she had built an entire life around, loved with a devotion she’d never questioned until this exact moment.
She forced her voice into something bright and unbothered. “Daddy was just tired, sweetheart. Aunty Blessing’s room has the good fan, that’s all. Go and play with your blocks now.” Tobenna nodded, satisfied, and ran off toward his room, and the moment his door clicked shut behind him, Ijeoma sank onto the cold tile floor, pressing both hands over her mouth to keep the sound of her breaking from carrying through the house.
She was still sitting there minutes later when the front door opened and Chuka walked in, smelling faintly of cologne, jangling his car keys in one hand. “Ijeoma, I’m back,” he called out easily, and when Ijeoma rose to meet him, she found herself looking at a man she suddenly, entirely, no longer recognized.
That evening, when Chuka leaned in to kiss her cheek, Ijeoma caught beneath his cologne the unmistakable trace of the cheap floral perfume she’d bought Blessing weeks earlier, and she turned her face just slightly, letting his lips land against her neck instead of her mouth. Blessing appeared from the kitchen moments later wearing a wrapper Ijeoma didn’t recognize as anything she’d purchased for her, her greeting warm toward Chuka and barely acknowledging Ijeoma at all.