Chapter Nine
Cilla
And beneath it all, my body thrums with the memory of his mouth on mine and the slow glide of skin on skin in the dark villa bedroom. I keep catching my reflection in the water and seeing a woman lightly sun-kissed, wholly satisfied and a little bit terrified of how much more she wants.
Back at the camp dock, Nico disembarks first, then Mpho starts the engine. Ashon helps me aboard last, lingering as the others turn away.
‘You okay?’ he asks quietly.
‘Better than.’ I bite my lip. ‘This morning was…good.’
He studies me, resolve gleaming in his eyes again. ‘But…or unexpectedly?’
‘Unexpectedly,’ I reply, not caring if it makes me weak or vulnerable.
Ashon nods, not disguising his smug pleasure. ‘I meant what I said—about wanting you on the project.’
‘Professional me or wife me?’
‘Yes,’ he murmurs, infuriatingly and sexily, and kisses my knuckles.
Heat unfurls in my stomach.
And later, as insects sing electrical choruses, I bathe, slip into a soft cotton nightdress and stand by the open screen watching fireflies spark over the floodplain. For the first time since this masquerade began, I feel…still.
Unperturbed. Maybe even bordering on…content?
Maybe I don’t have to decide anything yet.
I promised a year. It’s barely been weeks.
I can let the tide carry me for a while, savour the unexpected connection, the work, the baby’s quiet flutter beneath my palm.
And yes, the sublime sex.
For now, can I accept the status quo? Wife, potential collaborator, possible wildcard in his script.
The truth whispering through my pulse is simple. Today felt like the start of something worth staying for.
And tomorrow?
Tomorrow I’ll decide how brave I want to be.
One month later
Accra
The heat in Accra hits differently after you’ve breathed delta air and slept beneath Botswana stars, but it still feels like a promise. Like…home.
I pad across the marble floor of our new penthouse—yes, our penthouse—in the Airport residential area, a mug of milky rooibos warming my palms.
Twenty-one stories below, the city is murmuring awake. Hawkers calling waakye and traffic horns tuning up like brass bands.
One month since Botswana, and somehow everything has shifted without collapsing.
It’s magic and mundane at once.
The magic? I’m sleeping with my husband—no, making love to him, though the hopeless romantic in me still winces at the phrasing.
Blame pregnancy hormones or his sudden obsession with touching me every time I cross a room.
Either way, the sex is sublime. Slow, thorough, sometimes so tender it terrifies me.
He talks to my belly afterward, low promises I pretend to ignore while my heart cartwheels.
And sometimes when we’re out at one of the many events, he showers me with delicious compliments. Like the one last night, when we met with his cousin Theo, who it turns out is the main architect for Ashon’s studio project.
Theo had looked me up and down after brushing kisses on my cheeks. ‘Pregnancy becomes you,’ he’d said.
To which Ashon replied, ‘Indeed it does. Motherhood will become her even better.’
My heart had tripped over several times, barely waiting for Theo to leave—after a curiously terse inquiry about Tessa my cousin—before I turned to my husband. ‘And how do you know that?’
His gaze had met mine with unnerving intensity. ‘Besides your feverish conversations you have with our child when you think no one’s listening? Because I see how you fight for what you want, Cilla. You’re built for motherhood the same way you’re built for war. With everything you have.’
Of course that had robbed me of speech. Continued to wreak havoc with my emotions.
The excitingly mundane? I’m editing mood boards and treatment decks at the breakfast counter like a half-hired consultant.
‘Semi-professional,’ Ashon tosses out, though the email I received from my agent regarding how much Ashon’s studio plans to pay me for said work, made my jaw drop.
Best of all and, yes, I hate myself a little for my breathlessness when it happens, he actually listens when I say the third-act twist needs a female POV.
I allow myself a little smile after a sip of rooibos.
Convincing Ashon to leave Nana’s fortress took one spectacular post-midnight session, a tangle of limbs on those ridiculous Frette sheets, my mouth still swollen when I whispered, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up and step outside without your grandfather’s portrait scowling at us?’
He groaned something obscene, half-annoyed that I’d summoned his grandfather into our discourse.
And yet, within forty-eight hours we were enroute across the city, with suitcases and a disgruntled Renée trailing logistics via FaceTime while grumbling about time zones and inhumane working conditions.
Now the walls around us are ours…well until decisions—mine—are made.
Soft sage, charcoal, framed production stills leaning casually while we argue about where to hang them. There’s a nursery cornered off the master suite already painted a hopeful moonlit blue.
It should be perfect.
Except…
I can’t get the echoes of the conversations with my mother out of my head. She’s taken to calling every Sunday and, without fail, our video calls crescendo into scolding.
I still don’t understand why you did this.
I raised you better than to chase a Biney man.
Have you forgotten why we lost the farm?
Marriage is not reparation, Priscilla.
I reassure her, show her the healthy-baby scan, promise a full explanation soon, but guilt blooms like bruises under my ribs.
Another fly in the otherwise clear ointment?
Each time I ease the conversation towards the land—Have your lawyers heard from Nana’s team? Any timeline?—he kisses the question off my lips, or suggests gelato runs, or flat-out changes the subject.
Something isn’t right. I feel it in the way his shoulders tense whenever my phone buzzes with Mom’s name.
I pass my hand over the tight swell of my lower belly. I swore I wouldn’t bury my head in the sand, but life feels dangerously sweet: sunrise sex, script meetings, baby flutters like tiny, secret drumbeats. Digging for answers means risking this equilibrium.
But…how long can I keep pretending I don’t notice the rougher gravel in Ashon’s voice when past and future legacy come up?
At first, I tell myself it’s anything else but continued deliberate delays.
That contrary to what the registrar loftily states, the land transfer is complicated. Legal channels. Documentation. Verification.
But I also remember Botswana. And talk of plot twists and changing parameters. All of which seems to have been placed on ice since our return. I hate that I can’t seem to gather the courage to reignite that conversation.
Because I’m terrified of an adverse outcome? That I would rather hang all of his…uncertainty on a piece of land.
I tell myself that’s what started this and that I owe it to my family to see it through.
I recite it like a prayer. Like a woman trying not to admit she might have made the same mistake twice.
But by the end of the second week after our return, it’s beginning to feel hollow, a snag I keep pulling at instead of cutting off. And when the legal assistant who once answered my emails in seconds now sends polite delays, I know I’m letting the prayer become a knot in my throat.
Ashon’s still busy being the Biney heir. Hosting meetings. Touring potential locations. Rebranding himself as a Hollywood king who’s come home to build an empire.
Sometimes I catch him on the phone at midnight, pacing the expansive terrace, shirt off, cool in direct defiance of the heat, barking orders in a low, dangerous voice. The same voice he used the night he bent me over the edge of his bed, called me sweet and sinful and his.
I stand on the back balcony one afternoon, sipping lemon water, press a hand to the spot just under my navel and remind myself that I am not the naive girl who cried herself to sleep over broken promises. Not any more.
But when I turn back into the penthouse, my reflection in the French doors says otherwise.
There’s a distance growing between us.
And it isn’t emotional. It’s tactical.
Ashon
All good things come to an end…
Except I can’t help but feel this particular end is entirely of my own doing. That a single act will reverse the carnage I can sense approaching. But…damn it, I can’t help but lay blame either way.
So I keep silent on her land deed.
And she watches me like she’s waiting for the lie to fall from my mouth.
And I hate it.
Hate how much I want her to believe in me. Hate how I notice when her dresses start to flow looser, when her hand drifts instinctively to her stomach but the joy is muted, how she still wears the ring but never plays with it.
The land.
I should have signed the documents by now.
They sit on my desk, ready. All that remains is a signature and a call to the family registrar.
But I haven’t done it.
Because the timing is too perfect. Because as much as Botswana was sublime, possibly even a pathway to renegotiating something…more… I’ve heard her conversations with her mother. And now I can’t tell if Cilla’s presence in my life is fate or a move on a very long, very strategic chessboard.
She got pregnant. She agreed to the wedding. She asked for the land. I know all of that. But I also know there’s a shoe waiting to drop. And for the first time in my life, I can’t summon the balls to hasten that action. Besides withholding this last thing she wants.
What if she’s just smarter than all the others?
I remember the story my grandfather told me when I was fifteen. Of a woman he loved who nearly cost him the family legacy. Of how she sweet-talked her way into deeds and influence before revealing she was a spy for their rivals.
He never forgave her. Never forgave himself either.
Echoes of Delphine, lingering in the shadows as a warning.
Are you sure?
Teeth gritted and yes, perhaps even mildly disgusted with myself, I summon Nana Biney’s voice.
‘Guard your inheritance,’ he told me. ‘Even from the ones who say they love you.’
I didn’t think I’d carry that warning into my marriage.
But here I am.