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

Chapter 3

My dearest Adaobi,

If you are reading this, I am no longer with you. And I am so sorry. But there is something you need to know. Something I should have told you years ago.

I did not die of a heart attack. I was poisoned. And the person who poisoned me is the man you call your father. He wanted me dead because he wanted to marry another woman. A woman he had been seeing behind my back for years. But there was more to it than that.

I had discovered something about him. Something he could not allow to come out. I had proof that he had been stealing from his company for years. I had documents hidden in a safe place. I had told him I was leaving and taking you with me, and that if he tried to stop me, I would use what I had.

He didn’t try to stop me. He did something worse.

Please do not confront him alone. He is a dangerous man. Go to the police. Show them this letter. And please, my daughter, forgive me for not telling you sooner. Forgive me for all the things I kept from you.

I love you more than anything in this world.

Your mother, Ngozi.

I do not remember how long I sat on the floor of my father’s bedroom reading those three pages.

When I came back to myself, the light coming through the window had changed. It was later than I had realized. My phone had missed calls on it — Chidi, twice, and the school number.

I called Chidi back.

“Adaobi, where are you? Is everything all right?”

“No,” I said. My voice came out flat and strange. “Come to my father’s house. Come now.”

He came. When I showed him the letter, he read it without speaking. His face, which was normally easy to read, went careful and still in a way I had rarely seen before.

“Adaobi,” he said when he had finished. “This is serious. We need to go to the police.”

“I need to talk to him first.”

Chidi looked at me. “He is dead, Adaobi. You cannot talk to him.”

I knew that. My mind had not fully caught up to that fact. I sat with it for a moment — the strangeness of finding evidence of a crime committed against your mother, and the man named in that evidence already beyond any confrontation you could give him.

He was dead.

He had carried this secret with him his entire life and had died peacefully in his sleep and would never sit in front of me and explain himself.

Something enormous rose in my chest. I pressed my hand over my mouth and let it pass.

“We go to the police,” I said.

The police were not what I had hoped for.

They were not unkind. The detective who received us at the station — a woman in her forties with the patient eyes of someone who had heard many things and learned not to look surprised — listened carefully, took the letter as evidence, and told us she would begin an investigation.

“Your father is deceased,” she said. “That complicates the criminal proceedings considerably. But if what this letter says is true, there may be others involved. The doctor who signed the false death certificate. Possibly others who knew and said nothing.”

“Will anyone be held responsible?” Chidi asked.

The detective looked at both of us. “We will try,” she said. “That is what I can tell you.”

I left the station feeling hollowed out. Justice for the dead is a different thing from justice for the living. It doesn’t heal the same way. It fills a different kind of space.

The woman came to my house on a Saturday morning.

I did not know her. She was perhaps ten years older than me, well-dressed, with the kind of composed exterior that suggests someone has worked very hard to maintain composure through difficult circumstances. She introduced herself by her first name only. Roseline.

“Your father was in love with me,” she said. “Or what he believed was love. I did not feel the same way. I told him many times that I was not interested.”

I stared at her across the sitting room table. “You are the woman he wanted to marry?”