10/01/2026
At a time people used to say Obinna was a good man, and in many ways, he truly was. He had quite a large farmland and took care of his household as best as he knew how. His wife Ngozi had been with him since their struggling days, when the compound was still bare, but they were happy.
Ngozi gave him children. Three daughters. Strong girls who ran barefoot across the compound, laughing loudly, chasing chickens and each other. For a long time, that laughter was enough. Or at least Obinna told himself it was.
It was the villagers that first made him uneasy. At the market, people whispered in lowered voices when Ngozi passed. At the stream, greetings became followed by long looks. Among the men, jokes began to carry weight. Someone would laugh and say, “Obinna, your daughters will soon marry and go. Who stays with you then?” Another would add, “A man without a son has no one to carry on for him.”
Ngozi heard these things without hearing them. She felt them in the way conversations stopped when she arrived, in how people asked her husband about his farm but asked her only about her womb. At night, she lay beside Obinna and felt him drift further away, not in anger, but in thought.
When his mother spoke, it was as if she only gave words to what everyone already believed. She sat in the compound one evening and told her son plainly that tradition could not be ignored. A man needed a male child. It was not said with cruelty. It was said as a fact.
Obinna did not argue. He did not defend Ngozi either. He only nodded, his silence louder than any insult.
That was how Amarachi entered the compound.
She came softly, the way a second wife often does. Head bowed. Voice gentle. She greeted Ngozi every morning and called her Mama. She cooked, she swept, she smiled. The elders said Obinna had chosen well. Even Ngozi wanted to believe it.
The change did not come suddenly.
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