Chapter 4: Twenty-Three

I didn't sleep. I sat with the diary until the sky outside my father's study window turned from black to grey, running the same handful of sentences through my mind until they stopped sounding like words and started sounding like a verdict. You are the fifth. Four women before you. Before her twenty-third birthday.

I turned twenty-two three months ago. I did the math without meaning to, the way you can't stop pressing on a bruise once you know it's there, and every version of it landed on the same answer. If the pattern held, I had less than a year.

I found my mother in the kitchen at first light, already awake, already stirring something over the fire like the world hadn't tilted sideways in the night. She looked up when I came in, took one look at my face, at the diary clutched in my hand, and I watched twenty-two years of careful, practiced avoidance drain out of her all at once.

"You found it," she said. It wasn't a question.

"You knew," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt, sharp-edged in a way that surprised even me. "You knew this whole time, and you let me walk around this compound for two days thinking I was losing my mind."

"Amara—"

"Don't." I set the diary down on the table between us like evidence at a trial. "I want you to tell me. Not write it, not hint at it, not swallow it halfway through a sentence like everyone else in this village seems to enjoy doing. Tell me. All of it."

My mother's hands stilled over the pot. For a long moment she didn't move, and I thought she might do what she'd done my whole life, retreat into some vague, comforting half-truth and wait for me to give up asking. But something in my face must have told her that door had closed for good, because instead she wiped her hands on her wrapper, sat down across from me, and finally, finally looked me in the eye.

"In this family," she said, "the firstborn daughter dies before her twenty-third birthday. It has happened to your great-great-grandmother. To your great-grandmother. To my mother. Four generations, Amara. Four women, gone before they should have been, all at the same age, all in ways nobody could ever fully explain."

"How," I said. My throat had gone tight. "How did they die?"

"Different ways. Different sicknesses. Your great-grandmother drowned. My mother—" her voice caught, and she pressed her palm flat against the table like she needed something solid to hold onto. "My mother drowned too. In the same river you were walking beside two nights ago."

I thought of the woman in white, standing so still at the water's edge, watching me the way you watch someone you've been waiting for. My stomach turned over.

"And you never told me," I said. "Twenty-two years, Mama. You let me grow up thinking we left Ijesun because you and Papa wanted a better life in the city. You let me think that was the whole story."

"I wanted it to not be your story at all." Her eyes filled, and for the first time since I'd walked into that kitchen, she looked less like a woman keeping a secret and more like a mother who had spent two decades terrified. "I thought if I kept you away from here, away from this house, this river, this village and everything in it, maybe the curse wouldn't find you the way it found the others. Maybe distance would be enough."

"But it wasn't."

"Your father was dying," she said, and her voice cracked open completely now. "I couldn't keep you away forever, Amara. I couldn't. And I have spent every single day since he told me his diagnosis dreading the moment I would have to bring you back here, because I knew, the second you stepped off that bus, the countdown everyone in this family has been living under would start again. For you."

I stood up so fast the chair scraped hard against the floor. My whole body felt too small to hold what I was feeling, grief and fury and something colder underneath both of them, something that felt disturbingly close to fear.

"So that's it," I said. "I'm just supposed to accept that I have less than a year to live because some curse decided that four generations ago, and nobody in this family thought I deserved to know until I found out by accident, reading a diary I wasn't supposed to see?"

"I was trying to protect you—"

"You were trying to protect yourself from having to say it out loud!" The words came out louder than I meant them to, echoing off the kitchen walls, and I saw my mother flinch like I'd struck her. Some small, guilty part of me registered that I had just accused her of exactly what she'd accused herself of in the diary's final page, and that the accusation had landed because it was true.

I didn't stay to see what she'd say next. I turned and walked straight out of the kitchen, out of the house, out into the grey early morning with my bare feet hitting cold, dew-soaked dirt, my chest heaving with something too big to be called crying. I don't remember deciding to walk toward the river. My feet just took me there, the way they had two nights before, like the water was pulling something out of me that had nowhere else to go.

I was so far inside my own head that I didn't see him until I walked straight into his chest.

"Careful," a man's voice said, steadying me with a hand on my arm before I could stumble backward into the mud.

I looked up, ready to apologize, ready to explain, ready to do anything except stand there with tears streaking down my face in front of a stranger. But he wasn't quite a stranger. I recognized him, distantly, from photographs my aunt had shown me over the years, updates about the village I'd only half listened to. The chief's son. Older now, taller, broader through the shoulders than the awkward teenage boy I vaguely remembered from before we left.

Kelechi Okonkwo was standing at the exact spot on the riverbank where I had seen the woman in white two nights before, as though he'd been waiting there for me the whole time.