MY BROKEN RULE

CHAPTER FOUR:AUNTY ESTHER’S STORY

I didn't tell Chloe about the terrace. I told Aunt Esther instead, mostly by accident, over jollof rice at her cluttered kitchen table two nights later, the kind of place where I'd always ended up as a kid whenever my own house got too loud with my parents' arguing.

"You've got that look," Esther said, not even glancing up from the pot. "The Hayes women only get that look once."

"What look?"

"Like you've met someone and you're furious about it." She finally turned, wooden spoon still in hand, studying me the way she used to when I was small and she was deciding whether I'd earned a story. "Show me your wrist."

"Auntie—"

"Show me."

I held it out more to humor her than anything else. She turned it toward the light, ran her thumb over the inside of it, and went very quiet.

"There's a story," she said finally, "that gets passed down the women in this family. Skips generations sometimes. About a mark — small, like a crescent moon — that shows up on a Hayes woman's wrist the night she meets the one person fate actually meant for her. Not the convenient one. Not the safe one. The real one." She set my hand down gently. "Your grandmother had it. I never did. I used to be a little jealous of that, if I'm honest."

"That's not — Auntie, that's not a real thing."

"Mm." She went back to the pot, unbothered, the way she always was when she knew she was right and didn't need me to agree with her yet. "You keep telling yourself that."

I laughed it off at the table. I laughed about it the whole drive home.

I stopped laughing in my bathroom that night, under the harsh light over the sink, staring at the faint, unmistakable curve on the inside of my wrist that hadn't been there a month ago — and that I had absolutely no idea how to explain to anyone, least of all myself.

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