The shattered vase was not cleaned up. It remained, a carefully curated crime scene. The porcelain shards were swept away, but a single, larger piece—a curved fragment of a delicate flower petal—was left on the side table where the vase had stood. A monument to her carelessness. A daily reminder to everyone who passed of Mina's disruptive presence.
Adams said nothing about it. He walked past the fragment a dozen times a day, his eyes skittering away from it as if it were a shameful secret. His silence on the matter was a louder condemnation than any outburst could have been.
His silence had become a physical entity in their marriage, a third person in their room, colder and more distant than he had ever been. He didn't try to mediate again. He didn't try to explain or defend. He simply… absented himself.
One night, lying in the oppressive darkness of their room, the space between them in the bed feeling like a chasm, Mina finally spoke to the shadow of her husband.
"She left a piece of the vase on the table," she whispered into the void. "On purpose."
A long pause. Then, the sheets rustled as he shifted. "Just forget about it, Mina."
"Forget about it?" She propped herself up on an elbow, though she could barely see him. "How can I? It's a message. A daily message that I don't belong here. That I'm a bull in a china shop. Don't you see what she's doing?"
He sighed, a heavy, weary sound that seemed to carry the weight of the entire house. "You're reading too much into it. It was probably just overlooked. Binta must have missed it when she cleaned."
The excuse was so pathetic, so deliberately obtuse, that it stole the breath from her lungs. He was choosing to believe the hired help was incompetent rather than admit his mother was malicious.
"Binta doesn't miss a speck of dust," Mina said, her voice trembling. "And you know it."
"What do you want me to do, Mina?" he asked, his voice flat, exhausted. "Go to war with my mother over a piece of broken glass? Accuse her of some… some conspiracy? She'd think I'd lost my mind."
"I want you to see it!" she pleaded, the desperation raw in her throat. "I want you to look at it and know, in your heart, that it's there to hurt me. I don't need you to start a war. I just need you to know. I just need you to be on my side in this room, right now, and say 'You're right. That's cruel.' Is that really too much to ask?"
The silence that followed was thicker and heavier than before. It was the silence of a door being locked from the inside.
"I'm tired," he said finally, the words a final, brutal dismissal. "I can't do this tonight. I just can't."
He rolled over, turning his back to her, and within minutes, his breathing evened out into the shallow rhythm of sleep. Or a very convincing imitation of it.
Mina lay there, staring at his back, feeling more alone than she had ever felt in her life. His silence wasn't just passive; it was a active choice. He was choosing sleep over her pain. Choosing denial over truth. Choosing the peace of his gilded cage over the woman shivering inside it with him.
The next day, the silent treatment escalated. At lunch, Trisha, now more comfortable with the nanny, reached for a handful of mashed plantain from Binta's plate instead of Mina's.
Hajiya Zainab smiled, a genuine, triumphant smile. "You see?" she said to no one and everyone. "Children know where they are best cared for. They gravitate towards order."
Mina's heart shattered. She looked across the table at Adams, her eyes begging him, pleading with him to say something. To defend his daughter's connection to her mother. To call out his mother's poison.
He saw her look. He held her gaze for a fraction of a second, his own eyes wide with a trapped panic. Then, he quickly looked down at his own plate, cutting his meat with an intense, unnatural focus.
The message was clear. His plate was more important than his wife's heartbreak.
Later, she cornered him in the library, her composure completely gone. "Did you see that? Did you hear what she said? She's turning my own child against me, and you just… you just sat there!"
He flinched, closing the book he wasn't reading. "Mina, keep your voice down," he hissed, looking nervously toward the door.
"Why?" she challenged, her voice rising despite herself. "Why should I? Are you afraid your mother will hear? Are you afraid she'll know her son has a wife with feelings?"
"I'm afraid this is going to get worse!" he shot back, his own fear manifesting as anger. "Every time you react, every time you challenge her, she tightens the screws! Don't you get it? The only way to survive this is to not play the game!"
"So my survival depends on me becoming a ghost?" she cried. "On letting her erase me without a sound? On watching you let her do it?"
"What is the alternative?" he shouted, finally matching her volume, his face contorted in anguish. "Tell me! What is the alternative? Because I don't see one! I have no job! No money! No leverage in this house except her goodwill! What power do you think I have to stop any of this?"
The truth exploded out of him, ugly and desperate. He was powerless. And he was demanding that she join him in his powerlessness.
Mina took a step back, looking at him as if seeing him for the first time. The great Adams Dared, the titan of industry, the master of his universe, was gone. This was all that was left. A terrified boy, begging his wife to be quiet so the dragon wouldn't eat them.
All the fight left her. The anger, the desperation, the pain—it all drained away, leaving a cold, hollow calm.
"You have the power to see me," she said, her voice now quiet, eerily steady. "You have the power to hold my hand when she insults me. You have the power to whisper in the dark that you're on my side. That is the only power I ever asked you to use. And you won't. Because you're saving it all for her."
She didn't wait for a response. She turned and walked out, leaving him standing alone amidst the shelves of books filled with other people's words, utterly bankrupt of his own.
That night, he tried. Perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of a last, desperate attempt to connect, he reached for her in the dark.
His hand brushed her shoulder.
Mina didn't flinch. She didn't pull away. She lay perfectly still, her body rigid, her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.
His touch, which had once set her skin on fire, now felt like a violation. It was the touch of a stranger. A collaborator.
After a moment, his hand retreated.
He didn't try again.
The silence that followed was the deepest yet. It was no longer the silence of conflict or anger. It was the silence of a death. The death of their partnership. The death of their intimacy. The death of the hope that he would ever be her husband again in any way that mattered.
His silence hadn't just deepened her pain. It had killed the last thing she was clinging to.