My Late Mother’s Hidden Letter Revealed My Husband Was Her Chosen Heir

Chapter 1

My name is Adaobi.

And everything I thought I knew about my life was a lie.

My mother died when I was twelve years old.

The official cause was a heart attack. That is what the doctor wrote on the death certificate. That is what my father told the relatives who gathered at our house for the burial. That is what everyone believed, because the doctor had signed his name at the bottom of a document, and when a doctor signs his name at the bottom of a document, people stop asking questions.

But I never stopped asking questions.

Because I had known my mother. And my mother was not a woman who died of a heart attack at thirty-five years old.

She was healthy. She was strong. She laughed loudly and cooked with both windows open so the neighbors could smell what was happening in our kitchen. She danced to the radio on Saturday mornings. She carried heavy market bags without asking for help. She chased me around the compound when I refused to finish my homework, and her stamina was better than mine even though she was more than twice my age.

Women like my mother did not die of heart attacks.

I said this. I said it to my father. I said it to my uncle. I said it to the neighbor women who came to sit with us and help with the cooking in the weeks after the burial. They all told me the same thing.

You are just a child. You do not understand. Your mother is gone. We need to move on.

I was twelve. What could I do?

I moved on. I grew up. I went to university, where I studied accounting because my mother had always told me that a woman who could read numbers would never be cheated. I graduated. I got a job. I married a man named Chidi, who was steady and kind in a way that reminded me of nothing I had experienced growing up in my father’s house, which was part of why I chose him.

We had two children. A boy named Emeka and a girl I named Ngozi, after my mother.

I thought I had healed. I thought the wound had closed.

I was wrong.

My father died on a Tuesday morning in February.

He had been sick for two years. His heart — that organ that had apparently been so unreliable in our family — had been failing slowly, giving him enough warning to prepare and enough time to say the things he needed to say, or to decide not to say them.

He died peacefully, which was more than he deserved, though I did not know that yet.

I was heartbroken. Even difficult men leave spaces behind them when they go. Even fathers who were cold and controlled and who made you feel, in some fundamental way, that you were always on the wrong side of a door they held shut — even those fathers take something with them when they die, and the absence of that something is its own kind of grief.

I went to his house to clear his things.

It was the third day after the burial. Chidi wanted to come with me, but I told him I needed to do it alone. Some things are private even from the person you love most. The sorting through of a dead man’s possessions is one of them.

I worked through the house slowly. The kitchen first. Then the sitting room. Then the bedroom, which smelled still of the pomade he had been using since before I was born.

It was under his bed that I found it.

A small wooden box. Old and dark from years of handling. There was a padlock on the latch — a small one, the kind that could be opened with a key barely larger than a coin.

I searched the room for twenty minutes before I found the key. It was in the inner pocket of his old suit jacket, the one he had worn to my university graduation and which had been hanging in his wardrobe ever since.

I unlocked the box and opened the lid.