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The first time Nneka saw Dayo again, it was at her sister’s funeral. He stood by the mango tree near the churchyard in Enugu, hands folded, his once-smooth jaw now rough with regret. The man who had shattered her heart five years ago dared to show up in black agbada, his eyes downcast as if mourning a different kind of death.
Nneka felt her chest tighten, not just from grief, but from the sting of old memories clawing their way to the surface. They had once been the perfect pair — a Lagos-to-Enugu love that defied family pressure, ethnic divides, and even the harsh whispers of gossip. Nneka, the Igbo daughter of a prominent businessman, and Dayo, the Yoruba architect whose smile could silence a storm. They had built dreams on rooftops, written love letters in each other’s languages, and carved their names into the palm tree behind her father’s compound.
But three days before their wedding, it all crumbled. Dayo had disappeared — vanished like a ghost. No call, no message, no explanation. Her father, furious, had called it a betrayal from "those people." Her mother wept for days. And Nneka? She hardened, erasing his name from her heart, or so she thought. She left Enugu for Port Harcourt, built a thriving interior design business, and refused to speak of him again. Until now.
“I didn’t come to make things worse,” Dayo said quietly when he finally approached her after the burial. “I came to pay my respects. Amara… she was kind to me.”
Nneka’s jaw clenched. “You have some nerve,” she replied. He nodded, accepting her anger. “I deserve that.”
The silence between them was thunderous.
“What happened, Dayo?” she asked finally, her voice low but shaking. “Why did you leave me standing at the altar with my soul in pieces?” His eyes filled with pain, something she hadn’t expected.
“My mother was diagnosed with kidney failure. She collapsed two days before the wedding. I flew her to India, using the money we had saved for the ceremony. I thought I could fix it quickly and return before everything crumbled. But I couldn’t reach you. Your father blocked my calls, and your brothers warned me never to come back. I chose my mother. But I never stopped choosing you.”
Nneka wanted to scream, to curse him, to pull his collar and throw punches that would land years too late. But her sister was gone, her only sibling. And grief has a strange way of turning rage into vulnerability.
“Why didn’t you come back?” she whispered.
“I did,” he said. “Two years ago. I sat outside your office for days. I saw you laughing with that man in the blue car. I thought you’d moved on.” Tears welled in her eyes. That man was her client — married with three kids.
The weeks that followed were turbulent. Dayo stayed in Enugu longer than expected. He offered to help renovate the orphanage her sister had founded before her death. They bumped into each other more often than she liked — at the market, at church, at the mechanic’s yard. Each time, the fire in her heart dimmed, even as it smouldered.
Then one night, in the courtyard of the orphanage, the heavens opened. Rain poured like it had something to prove. They took shelter under the veranda, soaked and breathless.
“You still make my heart ache,” she whispered, unable to stop herself.
He looked at her, chest heaving. “And you still make me believe.”
It wasn’t a perfect reconciliation. Her family still hated him. His own mother, now recovering, worried that the old wounds were too deep. Nneka wrestled daily with fear — the fear of being left again, of trusting too soon. But healing isn’t loud. It starts in the quiet — in helping him lay bricks for the new orphanage wing, in his remembering her tea without sugar, in her sending him fresh palm wine from Nkanu when he missed home.
Slowly, painfully, but beautifully, broken vows began to mend into new promises — not ones spoken at an altar, but ones lived daily.
When he knelt again — five years after the first time — he didn’t do it with a crowd or a band or flamboyance. He did it in her garden, beside the tree where they had once carved their names.
“No ring this time,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Just a heart that finally learned how to come home. Marry me, Nneka. Not because the past is gone, but because we have survived it.”
She said yes, not because everything was perfect, but because love, when true, finds a way to rise from the ashes. In that quiet garden in Enugu, with the wind rustling leaves and memories, two hearts that were once broken learned how to beat as one again.
