When History Repeats Itself

The Other Daughter

** Kerry - Keke Palmer**

Nine years ago...

My palms were sweaty.

Even with the air conditioning humming like it had something to prove, my skin prickled. We had been parked outside the gate for almost ten minutes. My father's fingers tapped a nervous rhythm against the steering wheel. Neither of us had said a word.

Inside the high white walls was the house I'd be calling home for the next two years at least. My father's house. His wife's house. Sumaya's house. Not mine. Not really.

Mum was somewhere in the clouds by now, halfway to London. I pictured her alone on that plane, probably crying quietly behind those oversized sunglasses she only wore when trying to hide her emotions. I was all she had left here. The thought made me feel guilty and abandoned at the same time.

I pressed my palms against my thighs. My dress had started sticking to me, even though the car was cold. Everything felt damp with nerves.

Sitting here, bags in the boot, heart in my throat, I tried to tell myself I was ready.

I wasn't.

But this was happening anyway.

My father turned to me. "You okay?"

I nodded.

A lie.

"I'm sorry we couldn't do this differently," my father said suddenly, not looking at me.

I didn't respond. Because what was the right way to do this? To move a seventeen-year-old girl into the home of her father's wife and their daughter—the child from the real family—because her own mother had gone off to pursue a degree in a country that didn't ask as many questions?

Sixteen years ago, I was born a secret. A complication. My mum was twenty-four and waitressing in a dusty bar on the outskirts of Accra when she fell in love with a man she had no business loving. A man who was already five years into his marriage with a military officer and raising a toddler. So she ran from her family in shame, pregnant and alone. She was convinced that keeping me away from that world was the only way to protect me.

Her savior was an older man who had retired from running his shipping business and moved outside the city to farm in peace. He was known as the man who lived alone—content, or so it seemed, in the quiet company of his own thoughts. Not quite unfriendly, but always distant, he answered greetings from neighbours and farmhands with curt nods and polite silence.

One of those farmhands had recommended my mum as a live-in help to cook and clean. He agreed without fuss and took her in. This old man who found comfort in solitude invited a young mother and her one-year-old to live in his guesthouse.

He housed us. Protected us. Gave my mum space to land. And then, slowly, showed her how to stand again. When she could, he convinced her to reconcile with her parents. He drove her to their doorstep, sat beside her as she apologised for running away and keeping their grandchild hidden for two years, and promised that his doors would always be open to us as he left her where she belonged.

Somewhere between the silent kindnesses and the sleepless nights, they had become each other's family. The kind of man society forgot to count—unmarried, childless, and wrapped in solitude—became a constant in our lives.

We called him my godfather, though no church had ever blessed it.

My grandparents met me when I was two. Grandma Lizzie said we both cried when she hugged and kissed me: I cried because she was a stranger, and she cried because I was the living proof that her nightly prayers had reached God.