27/05/2026
📖 PART 4
SHE HATED MEN. SO SHE PAID ONE TO PRETEND TO LOVE HER. BUT WHEN THE CONTRACT ENDED... SHE WAS THE ONE BEGGING HIM TO STAY. 😭💔
📍 PART FOUR
Ifeoma didn't know how to cry.
Sounds strange, right? Everyone knows how to cry. But Ifeoma had trained herself not to. Every tear was weakness. Every sob was a memory of her father's fists, her mother's abandonment, her grandmother's cold funerals.
So when the tears came in Dipo's room, they came violently.
She didn't sob prettily like women in Nollywood movies. She gasped. She choked. Her whole body shook.
Dipo didn't touch her.
He didn't say "it's okay" or "don't cry."
He just sat on the floor across from her, cross-legged, and waited.
"Do you know what it feels like," she finally said, voice wrecked, "to be nine years old and watch your mother choose herself over you?"
"Yes," Dipo said quietly.
Ifeoma looked up. "What?"
"I was seven. My father took me to a motor park, bought me biscuits and Fanta, and told me to wait for him. I waited three days. He never came back."
Ifeoma's tears stopped. "You're lying."
"I wish I was." Dipo's voice was calm. Flat. Like he'd told this story a thousand times. "My mother couldn't take care of me. She was sick. So I lived on the streets until I was twelve. An uncle found me. Took me in. Beat me until I was fifteen. I ran away again."
"How did you survive?"
"Art." He gestured to the canvas in the corner—a half-finished painting of a woman standing alone in a field. "I drew. I painted. I drummed. It kept my hands busy so my mind couldn't kill me."
Ifeoma stared at him.
All this time, she had seen him as a struggling artist. A broke boy. A nuisance.
She had never seen him as a survivor.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"You never asked." He smiled sadly. "You were too busy hating me to see me."
That sentence cut deeper than anything her parents had said.
"I don't hate you," she whispered.
"No," Dipo agreed. "You hate yourself. I'm just the closest target."
Ifeoma wanted to argue. But she couldn't.
Because he was right.
She hated her soft heart. Hated that she still loved her mother. Hated that she felt guilty about her father's guilt. Hated that she was thirty-two years old and had never been held without paying for it.
"I don't know how to do this," she admitted. "How to... let someone in."
Dipo leaned forward. "Then don't. Just let me sit here. That's enough."
They sat in silence for an hour.
Not touching. Not talking. Just breathing the same air.
Around 3am, Ifeoma's head drooped. She was exhausted—emotionally, physically, spiritually.
Dipo stood up. Got a blanket from his bed. Draped it over her shoulders.
"Stay," he said. "Or go. But don't make a decision based on fear."
She stayed.
She fell asleep on his floor, wrapped in his blanket, while he painted through the night.
When she woke up at 6am, he had finished the painting.
It was her.
But not the Ifeoma she saw in the mirror every day. The woman in the painting had soft eyes. Unclenched jaw. A small smile, like she was remembering something pleasant.
"That's not me," Ifeoma said.
"It's who you could be," Dipo replied.
She took the painting to her room.
She hung it above her bed—right where she could see it every morning.
And every morning, she told herself she didn't care.
But every morning, she looked at it a little longer.
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👉 The real trouble starts in Part 5. Ifeoma's ex-best friend sees Dipo at a supermarket and recognizes him from somewhere. And what she reveals will shatter everything.
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