Chapter 2: Destiny’s Knots and the Price of Love

In my previous life, I chased after my marriage to Tunde step by step, using my head.

Each move like setting stones across a river, careful not to fall in. Every woman in Ibadan knows: sometimes love is not enough, you must use sense too.

My aunty—my mother’s younger sister, who later became a second wife in the Chief’s house—took me in after my mother died.

She never had her own children, so she raised me with all her love, treating me like her own daughter.

Even when she couldn’t buy me fine lace, she’d stitch together Ankara remnants and fry akara balls to cheer me up. In my heart, she filled the hole my mother left behind.

The house helps in the compound acted respectful in front of her, but behind her back, they would mock her.

They said she brought all sorts of poor relatives to come and chop free food in the Chief’s house, that a trader’s daughter could never be presentable.

Their whispers were like mosquitoes at night—persistent, biting, but never brave enough to sting in the open.

My aunty was naturally gentle and soft-spoken.

Even after more than ten years in the Chief’s household, she was still like floating water hyacinth—no roots, no support. She didn’t have the power to run the house, and she had nobody to back her up. Whenever trouble came, she could only hide somewhere and cry quietly.

Many evenings I’d find her at the back veranda, wiping her eyes, pretending the pepper in her stew was to blame.

Me and her, we’re not the same at all.

Since I was small, I liked to compete and win. I always went for what I wanted.

My tongue was sharp and my spirit strong; if a door was closed, I’d look for the window.

The first time I saw Tunde,

My heart just scattered, telling me—

I wanted him.

But who was Tunde?

He was the legitimate eldest son of the Chief’s house, as refined as an oba’s staff and as rare as Benin bronze.

His Yoruba was polished, his steps never rushed. Even his laugh was measured—never too loud, never too soft.

The number one gentleman in Ibadan, cold and far like the moon in the sky.

Some even whispered his mother had prayed for a child of destiny and received one who seemed not to belong to this world.

Calm and reserved, upright and proper.

How could someone like me—an orphaned girl from a trader’s family—even think of him?

The big girls in the city used to laugh at me, saying I was shameless, that I was only deceiving myself.

Everybody said I wasn’t good enough.

But me, I refused to let go.

In the end, Tunde married me.