His face crumpled for a second, then hardened again. “You lost me because you believed I was dead.”
“I watched them bury a coffin!”
“And you never asked why it had to stay closed.”
Aerys stared at him. The same sentence. The same wound.
Then he said, very quietly, “Your father told you I died. And you believed him.”
The room went still.
“My father?” she repeated.
Emeka let out a long, exhausted breath and leaned against the doorway as if standing itself had become difficult. “You really don’t know.”
“Know what?”
He looked at her for a long moment, seeing her confusion, perhaps realizing it was real.
Then he said, “Your father hated me from the first day he met me.”
Aerys said nothing.
Deep down, a part of her had always known that. She had just never let herself look too closely.
“At first,” Emeka continued, “it was little things. Comments dressed as jokes. Polite insults. The kind that let him act offended if I reacted. Then after we got engaged, he stopped pretending.”
He moved past her and into the main room. Aerys followed.
“He called me every day when you were at work,” Emeka said. “Sometimes twice. He said I wasn’t good enough for you. Said I was dragging you down. Said I would ruin your life. He came to the site when you weren’t there and criticized everything. The project. My clothes. My ideas. Me.”
Aerys felt the floor disappear beneath her certainty.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He laughed, tired and furious. “Because he told me exactly what would happen if I did. He said you’d never believe me. That I was just a laborer, a poor man trying to make trouble. He asked me who I thought you’d choose if it came down to me or him.”
Aerys opened her mouth and then stopped.
Because even now, standing there, she could not say with full confidence what her younger self would have done. She loved Emeka. But she had also trusted her father completely.
Emeka saw the answer in her silence.
“Exactly,” he said.
Tears stung her eyes.
“He offered me money to leave,” Emeka went on. “A lot of money. He put it on the desk and told me to disappear. Said it was the easiest way. I refused.”
Aerys lowered herself slowly into the nearest chair, suddenly too weak to stand.
“He didn’t like hearing no,” Emeka said. “A few days later, he came back even angrier. He had found out I was planning something.”
Aerys looked up. “Planning what?”
Emeka’s face changed. Softer, for one painful second. “I was going to surprise you,” he said. “I had booked us a small trip. Nothing fancy. Just a few days away. I was going to take you to the coast and tell you there, under the sunset, that…” He stopped.
“That what?” she whispered.
His eyes filled. “That you were pregnant.”
Aerys’ whole body went cold.
The room blurred.
“What?”
He nodded once, jaw clenched against emotion. “I found out before you did. I had the test. I was waiting for the right moment. I wanted to do it beautifully. I wanted us to start our little family with joy.”
A sound left Aerys then, small and broken, more breath than voice.
She had lost more than a fiancé.
She had lost a child she never even knew she had been carrying.
“I miscarried two weeks after your funeral,” she whispered, hands shaking now. “The doctors said it was stress. They said the grief… I didn’t even know what I had lost.”
Emeka looked away, and both of them stood there inside the wreckage of that truth.
When he spoke again, his voice was rough. “Your father found out somehow. Maybe he had someone watching me. Maybe he checked something. I don’t know. But he came to me furious. He said the pregnancy changed nothing. He said it made me a bigger problem.”
Aerys pressed her hands to her face.
“He told me if I didn’t disappear, he would make people think I was unstable. Dangerous. He said he would destroy me first, and if that didn’t work…” Emeka’s throat tightened. “Then accidents happen.”
Silence sat between them.
“How did he do it?” she asked finally, though part of her did not want to know.
Emeka looked toward the trailer window, as if the memory lived somewhere beyond it.
“I left that night,” he said. “I was terrified. I packed one bag and walked through the rain to the bus station. I was going to go anywhere. I didn’t care where. I just wanted to get away before he could do worse.”
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