SHE DROWNED THE NIGHT I WAS FIFTEEN — TEN YEARS LATER, A PHONE CALL USED THE SECRET WORD ONLY MY TWIN KNEW

Chapter 2

I told Kunle everything, sitting at the kitchen table with my hands wrapped around a cup of cold tea. He listened the way he listens, with his whole face. Then he said, gently, “Temi. Baby. It could be a prank. Someone who knew about your sister, playing a cruel game with your grief.”

“It wasn’t a prank,” I said. “She used the word. The word that exists only between Ayo and me. No one on this earth knows it.”

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “What do you want to do?”

“Go home. Find the truth.”

I took the first van to Araromi the next morning, and the village looked at me like a ghost returning to haunt it. I went straight to Dare Owolabi’s compound. He was married now, with three children running between his legs, and when he saw me his face went the colour of ash.

“Temi,” he stammered. “What — what are you doing here?”

“Ayo called me,” I said, and I watched his face very carefully. “She’s alive, Dare. I know you know something. Ten years is long enough. Tell me the truth.”

The man who had once made my sister glow collapsed onto his knees in the dust of his own compound. His wife stood frozen in the doorway with a baby on her hip. He was crying before the words came out.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen. That night — I went to break up with her. I swear it. But she fought me. She clawed my chest like an animal. And I pushed her, Temi. I pushed her once, and she went into the water, and I thought — I thought she was dead. I thought the river took her.”

“But she wasn’t dead,” I said. “She’s alive. So where has she been for ten years? Who has been hiding her?”

He lifted his face, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who has been bled dry for a decade.

“The letters started three months after,” he whispered. “Anonymous letters, every month, demanding money. They knew everything. They knew she was alive. They have been bleeding me, Temi — ten years of my wages, my inheritance, everything — to keep it quiet.”

“Who?” My voice was shaking now. “Who is blackmailing you?”

Dare looked at me as if the answer would break me. It did.

“Your mother,” he said. “Your own mother has been hiding Ayomide for ten years. She’s been hiding her, and feeding me to her, one month at a time — because your mother knows exactly what Ayo remembers from that night.”