Book One: Chapter One
The first thing Amira noticed when she stepped off the bus was the wind.
It rolled over the narrow road like an old hymn, warm and familiar, carrying with it the scent of brine, roasted plantains, and something harder to name—something like memory. The sky was already slipping into dusk, that soft golden hour when shadows lengthen and the world seems to hold its breath.
Aremu hadn't changed much. The same rusted rooftops. The same crooked palm trees. The same waves crashing against the red-clay cliffs below the town. But Amira had changed, and in the quiet return to this forgotten place, she could already feel the past stretching out its arms.
The wind shifted. And with it, a whisper.
"Ayo…"
She froze.
It wasn't her name, but it tugged at something inside her, something raw and ancestral. She glanced behind her, but the road was empty. Just the low hum of the sea and the hush of twilight settling like dust.
She adjusted the strap of her worn canvas bag and walked up the gravel path toward the house at the edge of the bluff—the only place that still tethered her to this town.
Iya Bola's house.
The home looked smaller than she remembered. The paint had peeled into jagged scales, and vines curled up the sides like green fingers. The wooden door creaked as Amira pushed it open.
Inside, it smelled of camphor and old secrets.
Her grandmother was in the sitting room, perched in the same carved chair as always, a thin shawl draped over her shoulders. She didn't rise. Didn't smile. Just looked at Amira with eyes that had seen too much.
"You look like your mother," Iya Bola said, voice gravelly, like the sea had scraped it over time.
Amira swallowed the ache that rose in her throat. "It's good to see you, Grandma."
Silence settled between them, heavy and pulsing.
"Why now?" her grandmother asked.
Amira didn't know how to answer. She hadn't come for forgiveness, or even love. She came because the funeral left too many questions. Because her mother had whispered, on her deathbed, "Go home. The wind will tell you."
She came because of the wind.
That night, as the sun sank into the sea, Amira stood on the back porch wrapped in one of her mother's old shawls. The sky was ablaze—amber, gold, tangerine. It looked like it was on fire, and somehow, that felt right.
The wind picked up again, rustling the dry leaves, swirling around her like a dance.
And then—again—she heard it.
"You don't know the whole story…"
The voice wasn't hers. It wasn't her grandmother's. And it wasn't her mother's, though it trembled with the same sorrow. It was older, maybe. Wiser.
Amira turned in a slow circle, heart pounding, the hair on her arms standing on end.
There was no one there.
Only the sea, the sky, and the voice of something long forgotten, calling her to remember.