27/05/2026
Part 6: THE WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED BITTERNESS LIKE WATER
By the time Adaeze was forty, the village had fully updated its opinion of her.
She was no longer "the firstborn of Mazi Emeka, the educated one, the one who used to sing in church."
She was now "that Adaeze." And the way people said "that Adaeze" held so much inside it, fear, pity, judgment, caution, and something close to sadness for those who still remembered who she used to be.
She had moved out of her parents' house and into her own small compound, a modest bungalow she had built with her savings and some government loan, and the compound had a strange quality to it that people couldn't explain rationally but felt unmistakably.
Dogs avoided the path in front of her gate. Children who played near her compound always eventually drifted away without being chased. Even the air around it felt different, like something invisible lived there and had arranged the atmosphere to suit itself.
She had become difficult to be around. Not loudly, not violently, Adaeze had never been the type for open aggression but in a cold, cutting, watchful way that made people deeply uncomfortable.
She would look at you for a moment too long before speaking. She would ask questions that probed in directions you had not expected. She would laugh at the wrong moments.
Her siblings had all tried, at various points, to reach her.
Ngozi had come to her house one afternoon, unannounced, with a pot of soup and a calabash of palm wine, the way you visit a person you love and are worried about.
She sat with Adaeze and they talked, and for a while it almost felt like the old days, like two sisters who knew each other from before the world got complicated.
But then Ngozi had
said, carefully, gently, "Ada, I feel like something has happened to you. Like there's something you're carrying. Can you talk to me? Can we go and see our pastor together?"
And Adaeze had looked at her younger sister, this younger sister who had a husband, three children, a car, a full life, and something ugly moved across her face. Not for long. But Ngozi saw it. And Adaeze said, very quietly, "Get out of my house."
Ngozi left the soup and the palm wine and left without another word, and cried all the way home in her car.
She never visited again.
One by one, the siblings pulled back, not out of malice, but out of a kind of helpless, grieving resignation. They still sent money for her upkeep, quietly, through their mother.
They still prayed for her, all of them, genuinely. They had not written her off as a person. But they had accepted, painfully, that the Adaeze they had grown up with was no longer there, and that the woman who occupied her body and her name was not someone they could safely get close to.
Because things had started to happen.
Ngozi's first son a boy of eight had fallen mysteriously ill a month after Ngozi's visit to Adaeze's house. The boy had fever that no medication could explain. Three hospitals. Two weeks. The child recovered, but the timing sat in people's minds like an accusation nobody wanted to make out loud.
Oby's husband had lost a major contract, a contract he had been building for months, the week after he and Adaeze had a small argument at a family gathering about something petty.
Coincidence, some said. Others said nothing and moved away from the subject carefully.
Old Mazi Emeka, Adaeze's father, a man of seventy-one who had always been strong as an iroko tree, began to decline in health after a visit to his eldest daughter's compound. He died fourteen months later. The doctors said it was his heart. But Lolo Chidinma never again entered Adaeze's compound after the funeral, and when asked why by her grandchildren, she only said, "Some places, a person must not go."
Was Adaeze responsible for any of these things?
That, nobody could prove. Nobody could say with certainty. Human beings get sick. Contracts fall through. Old men die. These are the realities of life.
But.
But the pattern.
The timing.
The way things happened around Adaeze. And those who had seen inside her compound, the few who had ever been allowed in, and had noticed the things in corners, under tables, behind doors. Those people did not need anyone to tell them what the pattern meant.
The church, the same church where Adaeze had once made old women sway with her alto voice, officially distanced themselves from her when she began appearing at certain gatherings in the village that no God-fearing person attended. The kind of gatherings held at midnight. The kind where the sounds that came from them, if you happened to be passing, made you walk faster without looking back.
Adaeze's name was removed from the choir register.
She did not seem to care.
To be continued...
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