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

Chapter 4

“That was his description of his intentions, yes.” She folded her hands in her lap. “But I was not willing. I was the one who told your mother about his behavior. I thought she deserved to know. I helped her plan to leave him.”

“So you knew her.”

“We became close. In the months before her death, we spoke often.” She paused. “Adaobi, I have been carrying something for a very long time. I have been waiting for the right moment to tell you, and I kept convincing myself the moment had not yet arrived. But you found the letter. And I think your mother would want you to know everything.”

She opened her bag and took out an envelope.

It was old. The paper had gone yellow at the edges, and the writing on the front had faded, but I could still make out the name written there.

It was Roseline’s name.

“Your mother left me a letter too,” Roseline said. “She left it with me personally, the last time we saw each other. A week before she died. She told me to read it only after she was gone, and to give it to you when you were old enough to handle the truth.”

“I am thirty-eight years old,” I said. “How much older did she need me to be?”

Roseline looked at me with something in her eyes that I could not immediately name. “I think she needed you to be ready. And I think the fact that you found her letter in that box means you are ready now.”

She placed the envelope on the table between us and said nothing more.

I did not open it while she was still there.

After she left, I sat with the envelope on the table in front of me for a long time. My daughter, little Ngozi, came in from the backyard and climbed into my lap and asked why I was just sitting there.

“I’m thinking, baby,” I told her.

“About what?”

“About your grandmother.”

She considered this. “The one who died before I was born?”

“Yes. That one.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Every day,” I said. “Since I was twelve years old.”

She thought about this with the seriousness that seven-year-olds bring to serious things. Then she kissed me on the cheek and climbed down and went back outside to find her brother.

I picked up the envelope.

The letter was in my mother’s handwriting again. The same compressed, careful script. She had always written as if she was trying to save space.

My dearest Roseline,

If you are reading this, then it has happened. And I am so sorry to leave you with what I am about to tell you. But you are the only person I trust with this. The only person I know will do what is right.

There is something I have never told Adaobi. I have kept it from her because I did not know how to explain it without destroying everything she believed about her own beginning. But she deserves to know the truth, even if the truth is difficult.

Adaobi is not his daughter.

I was already pregnant with her when I married him. Her real father was a man I had loved for three years before my family arranged my marriage. His name was Emmanuel Okonkwo. He was a teacher. He was gentle and patient and he loved me in the way that some people are loved only once in their lives.

When my husband discovered that I had been in a relationship with Emmanuel before our marriage — and when Emmanuel came to speak with him, to ask him to treat me well, because Emmanuel was that kind of man — my husband had him killed. I do not know exactly how. I was told it was an accident. A hit-and-run. But I know it was not an accident. I know, because I saw the way my husband looked when he told me.

He never told me directly. But he knew that I knew.