LOVE, LIFE AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN....CHAPTER FOUR

Truth Hurts... Okay so. Divorce. My dad filed for divorce. I stood there with my bag still in my hand, and I swear, my brain just stopped working for a full ten seconds. Like, the file was loading and loading and never actually opened. Divorce? My parents? The same two people who I have literally never seen fight in twenty-something years of me being alive? The same daddy who calls mummy "mummy Ifeyinwa" like it's her actual government name? "You're lying." I said it before I could stop myself. "Blossom, this is not funny." "Does it look like anyone is laughing?" Obi snapped, and honestly, fair. I looked around the kitchen properly this time — really looked — and it was like seeing a photograph you've looked at a hundred times and suddenly noticing one small thing that changes the whole picture. My mother, still bent over that table, her shoulders moving in a way that told me she wasn't just tired, she was breaking. Uche's hand on her back, rubbing slow circles the way you'd calm a child. Lisa, arms crossed so tight across her chest it looked like she was holding herself together physically. And nobody, nobody, would look me in the eye. "Somebody needs to tell me what is happening in this house," I said, and this time my voice cracked a little, because I was starting to understand that whatever this was, it was bigger than a strange woman showing up and saying good morning in Igbo. "Not now, Ifeyinwa." Blossom's voice was gentle but it had that big-sister finality to it, the one none of us ever argue with, not even Obi. "When, then? Because everyone in this house seems to know something except me!" Nobody answered. Uche helped my mother up from the table, and the two of them walked past me toward the stairs without another word, and Obi and Lisa followed right after, and just like that, the kitchen emptied out and it was just me standing there with my bag still on my shoulder like an idiot, watching my whole family disappear up a staircase and leave me in the wreckage of a conversation I never got to have. I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough that the oats I'd abandoned that morning felt like a different lifetime. I went up eventually, past my dad's closed door — I could hear nothing from behind it, not a sound, which somehow scared me more than shouting would have — and I found my mother's door cracked open instead. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, alone now, Uche gone somewhere else in the house, and for the first time since I could remember, my mother looked small. "Mummy." She didn't look up. "Mummy, please." I sat beside her, careful, like she might break if I moved too fast. "I'm not a child. Whatever this is, I can handle it. But I need you to tell me. Who is Ada?" "Ifeyinwa, not now." Her voice was so quiet I almost didn't catch it. "You keep saying not now. When is now going to come?" I took her hand, the way she used to take mine in the hospital after the piercing, and I held onto it. "Please, Mummy. I'm begging you." She was quiet for so long I thought she'd simply decided not to answer at all. Then she let out a breath that sounded like it had been sitting in her chest for twenty years. "You have to understand," she started, "that everything I did, I did because I loved you. Because I have always loved you like you came from my own body." Something in my stomach dropped before she even finished the sentence. "Mummy, what are you saying?" "Ada is not your sister, Ifeyinwa." She finally turned and looked at me, and her eyes were wet, and older than I had ever seen them. "Ada is your mother."

Love, Life And Everything In-Between

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