Chapter 23 #2
The words exploded out of me, and I watched as they both stared at me like I’d grown a second head.
“I’m in love with… with…with a woman.”
My voice cracked, but I pressed on.
“A white woman named Marley. And the reason I can’t marry Chukwuemeka is because I’m in love with her.”
I fumbled for my phone with shaky hands, scrolling frantically through photos until I found the one that made my chest ache.
It was a picture of Marley and me at the Christmas market in MapleRidge, her lips pressed against mine, both of us laughing as though we held the whole world between us.
I thrust the phone toward them, tears streaming down my face.
“This is who I am!” I screamed, my voice breaking completely. “This is what love feels like and I can’t keep pretending anymore that I’m someone I’m not just to make you happy!”
The silence that followed was deafening.
I watched as my father’s face drained of colour, his mouth working soundlessly. My mother covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes wide with horror.
“I love her,” I continued. “I love her so much, and I can’t live without her. I won’t—”
The slap came so hard it sent me stumbling backwards, my ears ringing.
The phone flew from my hands, skittering across the floor with a sharp crack.
For a moment, the world tilted sideways.
I pressed my palm to my burning cheek, tasting blood where my teeth had cut my inner lip.
The silence curdled between us, thickening into a wall of pressure that made it hard to swallow.
My father stayed pinned to the spot, hand still mid-air, his chest heaving with raw rage.
When I finally met his gaze, I realised the fire was gone.
In its place was something worse.
Disgust.
“You…” His voice came out strangled. “You are no daughter of mine.”
The words hurt more than the slap.
I turned to look at my mother, but she had gone completely still, her face like stone.
“Lesbian,” she whispered, like she needed to spit the word out. “My daughter is a lesbian.”
“Mummy—”
“God forbid!” she cut me off, her hands flying to her chest. “What kind of demon has possessed you? What happened to you in Canada? What did I do wrong? Where did I fail?”
The sound of her breaking apart was worse than my father’s anger. I couldn’t bear to watch as she began to rock back and forth, keening like a woman at a funeral.
“My daughter…ewo….ewo…kelechi e buom mo*.”
The commotion drew in my aunties from the sitting room. They filled the doorway like a jury, their faces twisted with confusion and horror. Aunty Ngozi was clutching her chest while Aunty Chinelo was muttering prayers under her breath, and Aunty Bernice looked like she might faint.
“Are you people seeing what KC has done to herself?” my mother wailed. “KC said she is a lesbian o.”
“Gini kam nanu*. Lesbian? Where? Tufiakwa*!” Aunty Ngozi gasped. “Abomination!”
“Chineke nna*! What will people say?” Aunty Chinelo’s voice rose to a wail. “What will outsiders say about us?”
“Why…KC?” Aunty Bernice added, shaking her head violently. “This is a curse on our family, a big curse!”
My father found his voice again, and when he spoke, venom dripped from every word.
“You want to imitate those white people, eh? Those godless people with their sick ways?” He spat on the floor beside my feet. “This is what Canada has done to you. It has filled your head with nonsense and perversion.”
I wiped the blood from my lip with my fingers that had grown cold, still tasting copper on my tongue. Something inside me was breaking apart, but also... something else was being born. A kind of fierce clarity I’d never felt before.
“Perversion?” I repeated, my voice growing stronger despite the tremor in my hands. “Love is perversion to you?”
“That is not love!” my father roared, pointing at my phone where Marley’s face smiled up from the cracked screen. “That is sickness! Mental illness! You need deliverance, not... not whatever this madness is!”
Aunty Ngozi stepped forward, her voice filled with righteous fury. “Holy Mary! We need to call our priest here immediately so they can bring the whole prayer council. This girl needs serious deliverance; the demons in her are too strong.”
“Yes,” my mother agreed, suddenly enthusiastic about this possibility. “They should cast out these evil spirits; this is not our KC. Our Kelechi would never...”
“Our Kelechi would never what?” I found myself shouting. “Our Kelechi would never be honest? Would never choose happiness over the life that you scripted for her?”
I bent down and picked up my cracked phone, holding the photo of Marley and me toward them. “This woman loves me, and she sees me. She knows who I really am, and she doesn’t want to change me. Can any of you say the same?”
“We love you too!” my mother cried, reaching toward me. “That’s why we want to save you from this... this thing that’s destroying you!”
“You love who you want me to be,” I shot back, backing away from her touch. “You love your perfect daughter who says yes to everything, who smiles and nods at everything. But you don’t love me, you don’t even know me.”
The room exploded into chaos then. Everyone was shouting at once, voices overlapping in a symphony of condemnation.
“She’s lost her mind completely!”
“The devil has taken hold of her!”
“We failed as parents!”
“Is this what you learnt over there!”
“Call father Everistus now!”
Then another voice cut through it all, though the mayhem. “STOP!”
Esther pushed past them and stood in front of me.
“You people never ask what makes sister KC happy. Never!”
She turned toward them, tears streaming down her face.
“You all just want to use her to make your own dreams come true, and it’s selfish!”
“Esther, stay out of this!” my father bellowed, his face purple with fury. “This doesn’t concern you!”
“It does concern me!” she fired back, tears streaming down her face. “She’s my sister! And I’ve watched her cry herself to sleep more nights than I can count because she was trying so hard to be what you wanted her to be!”
The room fell silent at this revelation as I stared at my little sister.
“You think she was happy with Chukwuemeka?” Esther continued. “She looked like she was dying inside every time his name came up. But none of you cared because he was what you wanted for her, not what she wanted for herself.”
My father’s voice came out cold and deadly. “Esther, if you support this... this abomination, you can pack your bags too.”
But Esther just lifted her chin higher. “If loving my sister for who she really is makes me an abomination too, then so be it.”
Looking at her brave, tear-streaked face, I felt something break inside me.
All my life, I’d been afraid of disappointing them, terrified of their rejection.
But standing here now, seeing the hate in their eyes, I realized I’d already lost them long ago.
The daughter they claimed to love had never really existed.
Something inside me shifted.
I wiped my tears with the back of my hand.
“I’m twenty-four years old,” I said, meeting each of their eyes.
“And I’ve spent my entire life trying to squeeze myself into who you wanted me to be.”
I held up the photo again.
“This woman makes me feel alive; she listens, she supports me. She loves the parts of me that you taught me to hide. And you call that an abomination? You call love a sin? Then what does that make your version of love, where acceptance comes with conditions and strings attached?” I sucked in air.
“If I have to choose between a God who demands I be miserable and a woman who makes me feel holy, I choose her…I would rather burn with her than freeze in this house of yours.”
My father’s face contorted with rage and disgust. “If you walk out that door, Kelechi… if you choose this sin over your family… You are no daughter of mine. Don’t you ever call me again, and don’t you dare come back to this house!”
His words landed with a weight that threatened to crush me and left my heart hammering so loud it was all I could hear.
I almost apologized because saying sorry was just a reflex I had lived with for years, but I swallowed it down once I realized I hadn’t done anything wrong.
After all, the words should have broken me.
But instead, a feeling like relief washed over me.
I smiled through my tears, a sad but peaceful smile.
“Then I guess this is goodbye.”
I walked over to where my little brother Chuka stood in the corner, his six-year-old eyes wide with confusion. I knelt and hugged him tight.
“Be good, okay? And remember that your big sister loves you very much.”
Then I turned to Esther, who was crying now, too. We held each other for a long moment.
“Thank you,” I whispered in her ear. “For seeing me.”
“I love you, KC,” she whispered back as fat tears rolled down her face. “Be happy and call me when you arrive.”
“I love you too, and I will.”
I picked up my luggage in one hand and Marley’s jacket in the other.
Everyone parted as I walked toward the door like I was carrying a plague.
Behind me, my mother had collapsed to the floor, wailing like someone had died.
“My daughter! Kelechi mo!” She was rocking her body with the kind of rhythm you only see at a graveside. It was the sound of someone mourning a body that hadn’t even gone cold yet.
Only then did it finally dawn on me that this was the real price of their love. They didn’t want the daughter who was standing in front of them, breathing and honest. They wanted the ghost of the girl who had been a lie.
I guess that was the tragedy of it, they would rather wail at the funeral of a daughter who never really existed than look into the eyes of the woman who was finally real.
I paused at the doorway, looking back one last time at the house that had shaped and caged me for so long. Then stepped outside, closing the door behind me on everything I’d ever known.
The gate creaked as it opened.
But this time, it sounded like freedom.
* No problem
* Kelechi has killed me.
* What am I hearing?
* God forbid
* God almighty