BOOK ONE Chapter One: When Life First Shifted
670 Words
It’s strange how a life can tilt without warning. One night you’re laughing on a dusty balcony with someone you think you might love, and the next morning you’re a completely different person, carrying a story you never planned for. Dinma didn’t fully understand that back then. She was just twenty, bright eyed, quick to trust, living on borrowed hope.
The compound she lived in was noisy in that familiar Nigerian way. Pots clanged. Radios argued with each other from room to room. Children ran around like their bodies were made of wind. Dinma moved through it with her usual quietness, that calm she wore even when her mind was racing. And on that particular evening, she felt light. Loved. Seen.
She was dating Somto at the time. The kind of guy whose smile could make a girl forget her fears for a moment. He wasn’t perfect, but they had a rhythm that felt like the beginning of something steady. She remembered sitting beside him, her head on his shoulder, thinking life was finally giving her a chance.
But life had its own twists.
What happened a few weeks later was something she never imagined. A night that rewired her sense of safety. A violence that didn’t scream loud enough for the world to hear, yet echoed inside her long after her voice went silent. She tried to bury it. Tried to keep her balance. But pain has a way of breathing under the door.
When she found out she was pregnant, she felt her heart drop into a place she had no name for.
Somto stared at her like she had betrayed him deliberately. Like her pain was a story she invented. He kept repeating that the child could not be his, that the dates didn’t align, that she wasn’t telling the truth. And Dinma, instead of fighting, simply broke a little more inside. It is a strange feeling, carrying both a new life and the sense that your own life is slipping away.
Still, she kept her faith. She held on to God in a quiet, trembling way. She didn’t have the energy for dramatic prayers. She had only whispers.
Please give me strength.
Please help me breathe.
Please help this child.
The pregnancy wasn’t easy. Not financially, not emotionally. Her mother tried her best, but there was only so much one household could carry. Dinma learned to fetch strength the way other people fetched water. Every morning. Every night. Constantly.
And yet, when Ike was born, something inside her steadied. She looked at his face and felt a kind of love that rearranged her bones. There was a softness in him, almost like he arrived in this world knowing she needed a gentle beginning. She named him Ike because she needed strength to be a person again.
But the world moved on with its complications. Somto refused to come close. He told people a story that painted her as unfaithful. She stayed silent. She always did. It wasn’t until years later that a DNA test ripped the truth open. By then, Ike was already eleven and already familiar with silence that wasn’t his fault.
Yet that truth, the one she waited for without admitting it, came too late to undo everything.
And that is where the story truly begins, because every wound she carried after that pushed her toward the woman she would later become.
Back then though, she was just a young mother holding a baby whose existence confused the man who created him.
A woman trying to grow a future while the ground under her feet kept shaking.
She didn’t know another storm was coming either.
She didn’t know Chidera’s father would enter her life carrying a different kind of harm.
She didn’t know she would break again, and again, and again.
But for now, on that warm morning with Ike wrapped to her chest, she simply whispered to him.
“We will be alright. Somehow.”
Even if she didn’t fully believe it yet.
- Writer
