The phone buzzed on the table for minutes, coming with curiosity, she picked.
"Baby, the voice said, warm and sure.
"Have you told your mom yet?"
Her chest tightened. Who ever this was clearly thought he was talking to her daughter, bathing just behind that door.
She held the silence, then answered low and firm, "This is her mother speaking, call back in next few minutes" she hangs the call.
To understand how she got here, standing frozen in her own parlor, you'd have to go back years. Back to marriage that turned cold before it's first anniversary.
Her husband Nze, was never one to raise his voice, his own way of hurting was quieter, a second house in town he thought he'd hidden well.
She knew, of course. Wives always knows before anybody tells them. Seven years she smiled over other people's weddings, while her own marriage rotted quietly inside.
Then on that Tuesday, over his breakfast he had a heart attack, his heart just stopped.
She cried at the burial, but if she's honest, some of those tears were relief.
Miriam, raised her daughter alone after that. Ola grew into a kind of fine that turned head everywhere she goes.
When the admission letter came, she was happy and fearful at the same time, her only daughter is going to the university, it was a case of mixed feelings. Fews months in the campus, she always calls her mom, campus gists, hard lecturers.
Miriam somehow started catching something else underneath the gist, a careful lightness she recognized from her own younger days of hiding things. That day she was forced to ask "It's nothing, Mama." She let it lie, at least outside.
Until that holiday, that phone call, that voice calling another woman's daughter "baby." When she came out of the bathroom, her mother didn't shout. She just asked who that was, and that "nothing" wouldn't do this time, everything spilled out. A lecturer, someone who called her brilliant and beautiful and made promises. Ola never said his age, and somehow it never crossed her mother's mind to ask. In her head, she'd already painted him young.
"I'm not vexed a man has noticed your worth," she said. "I only pray he's a good man."
Ola promised to be careful. But promises made in a mother's parlour are easy to keep, until you're back on campus, hours from home.
The calls didn't stop. Professor Okonji the name finally came out took her to a riverside resort. Peppered fish she'd never tasted, wine she couldn't place. By evening, her stomach turned against her, sharp and doubling, and he rushed her, panicking, to a private hospital.
Weak and frightened, she gave the nurses her mother's number.
Her mother arrived still in her wrapper, heart hammering. In the corridor, a man paced with his phone in hand, and she paused before saying a word. Grey scattered his beard, a tiredness sat on him like years he'd already carried. This was no boy.
"You," she said, voice shaking but low, "calling my daughter 'baby.' Feeding her food her body doesn't know. Bringing her here to almost die so you can bury it quietly?"
"Madam, please, I only"
"Only what? You're old enough to mate with her father. What sickness is this, a grown man who can't find a woman his own age?"
He said nothing, eyes on the floor. She walked past him into her daughter's room.
Ola was discharged after two days, it was food poisoning, nothing worse. But something in her had shifted too, watching her mother stand unshaking.
Weeks later, Okonji came to the house. She almost turned him away, but let him sit.
"I know how this looks," he said. "I've never married, not because no one wanted me, but because I never felt like myself with anyone. Not until Ola."
She studied him in the daylight. "Age isn't the only gap between you two. She's still finding her road. What happens when she wants her own career, her own name, before she's anybody's ma?"
"I don't want to stop that," he said. "If anything, I can help her get there faster."
"My daughter is not a debt to settle," she said finally. "If this is real, it'll still be real in two years, when she can stand as her own woman."
He nodded. "That, I can wait for."
Months later, on the veranda shelling melon seeds, Ola said, "Mama, thank you for not shouting that day."
Her mother smiled. "I wasn't saving my pride. I was saving you from becoming me, or becoming someone's mistake before you've become your own woman."
