Father,
It is strange how a single moment can divide a life into "before" and "after." I often wonder if you remember the exact day everything between us cracked, or if for you, it was just another argument that faded into the blur of your busy days. But for me, Father, it was the day the world tilted, the day home stopped feeling like home.
It began quietly, as all great storms do — with silence.
Mother had been ill for weeks then, her laughter dimming, her steps slower. You were always away, attending meetings, inspecting projects, signing deals. I remember the smell of disinfectant filling her room, the soft click of the wall clock, and her weak voice asking me to sing to her. I would sing, even though my throat burned with tears I refused to shed.
The morning she died, you were not there. I had sent messages, left notes with Noel, even called your office, but they said you were "in a meeting abroad." I remember sitting by her bed, holding her hand as it grew colder, her eyes drifting shut like windows closing for the last time. She whispered your name with her final breath. I whispered mine too, hoping she would carry both to wherever she was going.
When you returned, three days later, the house was heavy with grief. The compound was full of mourners, the air thick with incense and condolence murmurs. You looked at me once — just once — and then turned away. Not a word. Not a question. Not even a touch. I wanted you to ask me how it happened. I wanted you to hold me and tell me that everything would be all right. But instead, you locked yourself in your study. The walls took your grief; I took your silence.
After Mother's burial, you changed. Or maybe you had always been that way, and I was only now old enough to notice. You began to move through the house like a ghost in a perfectly tailored suit — cold, efficient, unreachable. The house staff walked lighter, afraid to disturb your quiet rage. Daniel, too, retreated into his own world. And me? I became invisible.
I started writing then.
At first, they were letters to Mother — childish scribbles of longing and confusion. But soon they became poems, then stories. I wrote about everything — about the mango tree, the lemon scent that still lingered, the way grief sounded when it walked through hallways. Writing became the only voice I had when yours was taken from me.
One evening, I made the mistake of showing you a short story I had written. It was about a little girl who lost her mother but found comfort in words. You didn't even finish reading it before you tossed it aside. "Nonsense," you said. "You should be thinking about real things, not wasting your mind on fantasies."
That word — nonsense — echoed in my head for years.
I picked it up, carried it with me, built a life around it, trying to prove it wrong.
You had other plans for me, of course. You always did. You wanted me to study business, to "continue the family legacy." But Father, I was never meant for boardrooms and balance sheets. My heart belonged to words, to the quiet pulse of creation.
And then there was Emmanuel.
Yes, I know his name still burns your tongue.
He was everything you despised — poor, idealistic, full of hope. He worked part-time at the university library where I went to read. His hands smelled of ink and dust, and his laughter — oh, his laughter — filled the spaces in me that had gone cold. He talked about dreams like they were something you could touch if you only reached far enough.
For the first time, I felt seen. Truly seen.
When I spoke, he listened — not like a man humoring a child, but like someone searching for meaning in my words. I told him about you, about Mother, about the silence that had become my inheritance. He never judged you. He only said, "Maybe your father loved too hard and too wrongly."
When you found out about him, your fury was thunderous. I remember that night as if it's branded into my bones. The rain was falling hard, hammering against the windows, as though the heavens themselves wanted to witness what was coming. You sat in your study, the same room where I had once waited for your praise.
"Who is he?" you asked.
I told you.
"What does he do?"
"He's a librarian," I said.
You laughed — that cruel, low laugh that always made the air freeze.
"A librarian," you said again, as if the word itself was an insult. "My daughter — the daughter of Chief— with a librarian?"
I tried to explain that he was kind, that he made me happy. But the more I spoke, the more your face hardened. You said he was beneath me, beneath us, as if love needed a pedigree.
And then you said the words that ended everything:
"If you walk out of this house for him, don't you ever come back."
I walked out anyway.
It was raining so heavily that night, Father. The water soaked through my dress, my shoes, my bones. But I didn't turn back. Not even when Adamu called after me. Not even when Daniel's voice echoed faintly from the corridor. I told myself it was freedom I was chasing. But it was really you I was still trying to find — or perhaps escape.
For a time, life with Emmanuel was simple and full of small joys. We shared a tiny apartment overlooking the city. He taught me how to live with little, how to laugh without reason. I started publishing short stories under a pseudonym. I even began to hope that someday, you might forgive me.
But happiness, Father, has never been patient with me.
It was an evening like any other when the car came out of nowhere. I can still hear the sound — metal folding, glass shattering, screams, then silence. When I woke in the hospital, Emmanuel was gone. Dead. Just like Mother.
And I was alone again.
You didn't come. You never even called. Maybe you didn't know. Or maybe you knew and didn't care. The doctors said I was lucky to survive. I didn't feel lucky. I felt hollow. Something inside me cracked that day and never healed.
That was when I stopped writing for others and started writing to you — letters I never sent, words that piled up like ghosts around me. I wrote about forgiveness, about death, about the possibility that love and pain might be the same thing wearing different faces.
Then came the sickness.
At first, it was small, a cough here, a fainting spell there. Then the diagnosis: a rare, untreatable condition, the kind that gives you months, maybe a year if the gods are kind. I moved to Monaco because the doctors there promised comfort, not cure. I accepted their honesty. I have learned that comfort, at the end of all things, is the highest form of mercy.
Sometimes I still dream of that night, Father — the rain, your face, your voice. In the dream, I don't leave. In the dream, you stop me at the door and say, "Stay."
But dreams are kind liars. In truth, we both lost something that night, you, a daughter; me, a father. And now I wonder which of us grieved longer.
I don't blame you anymore. I understand now that pride is just another kind of grief, a wall men build when love feels too dangerous. You built yours high, Father, but it didn't keep the world from breaking in. It only kept me out.
If you ever think of me, think not of the girl who disobeyed you, but of the one who stood by the gate every evening, waiting for your car to turn in, believing that love always came home.