Prologue

She carried Iziegbe's death around her like a cross. The death rocked her to the core. It was why she felt out of place at the evening dinner, where her presence was supposed to mean a lot. Where it was required of her to mount the podium at some point to talk about her brand as well as share tips for running successful businesses.

She was donning a Gucci premiere gown with a thigh-high slit and strappy heel sandals to go with it. Beautiful jewels adorned her neck and ears, and sitting pretty on her head was a black pixie cut wig that was styled to perfection.

It would have been easy not to honour the invite; too easy. She was a busy person, after all. But she thought about coming down to the event simply because she wanted to distract herself from the thoughts of losing Iziegbe; the closest person she had to a family.

The night before, she was listening to soft music and enjoying the rhythm of a masseur's hands on her back when the call that would shatter her world and a world she had tried so hard to keep behind; came in.

She changed back into her clothes at once, fear seething through her body even as she staggered to a seat. It was like a bad dream, one minute she was getting spoiled and the next, things had gone from good to bad. And later, bad to worse—having gotten a detailed call back.

The caller made her understand that Izi, her husband, and their four-year-old son were found lifeless and unclad in their home. With blood gushing out of some sentitive parts of their bodies.

It was something out of a horror movie and she could not have helped herself and gagged out the wine and cake she had, had in her stomach all day. Later, she would hurry out of the spa, leaving behind her bag, which would later be retrieved by her personal assistant, who also tendered an apology on her behalf, lying to the masseur and another female present, that she was ill.

The last she had spoken to Izi, the latter had been trying to force her to go down to Benin; if not for anything, to make a visit to the duplex she (Izi) had been building on her behalf. A lot of money had gone into it and Mudia had a whole ass folder of the duplex at different stages, on her phone courtesy of Izi. But the last thing on her mind had been to honour the invite. She didn't think she would ever visit Benin, but like a raw egg receiving its beating from a whisker, she suffered terribly from not wishing to find out more about Izi's death.

One

Mudia would do anything to not be the centre of attention at the moment, to get everyone to stop gawking at her as they did. As though they were doing her a favour.

Or as though an angel was right in their midst.

She wanted comfort, away from their prying eyes that held so many emotions, so real, she could feel them if she decided to stretch her hands to touch them. It was one of those things one couldn't unsee, couldn't bring oneself to stop noticing, which was worst than what she wanted at the moment.

In their own mind, she could be super gassed. Except they didn't know it was the latter. Except they didn't realize how tortured she was.

"Asides from her skin care brand which is spread across the country, she also owns a one stop hair salon - the best hair salon if I may add," There was soft murmuring from the crowd. "Makes the best skin care products, lashes and hair -"

Get right to it, she thought.

"The first-ever influencer to own many businesses and does such an excellent job in making all function well and lives such an exemplary life. I'm sure most of you can attest to that."

There were hearty cheers from the crowd but it didn't help that she could feel her breasts tightening against her outfit.

"Well, I hope with all I have said, she offers me a free consultation and recommends products for my skin type," The French journalist cum Nigerian show host said. He sure knew how to thoroughly engage his audience. Now and then, they laughed and cheered and nodded. And did everything in between.

"Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let's welcome the distinguished skincare mogul, Imudia Osarobo, even as she tells us more about her brand and maybe a little on how to achieve great skin,"

She was already making her way through the crowd to the podium.

"I'm keen on that, boya I need to be back to being the bouncing baby boy that I was, so girls like Ndidi will not leave my sorry ass because "Ayam not glowing".

There was more laughter from the crowd but the laughter had been because of his funny pronunciation of the Nigerian slang he made use of. Someone shouted from amongst the crowd asking how Ndidi was. The story with Ndidi was the show host's trade story, it got his audiences hooked all the time.

He began to say something but Mudia's mind trailed off. Her heart beating so fast against her chest as though it were about to explode. She was afraid she no longer possessed the confidence that Louka, the show host, had been boasting about all evening and that she helped people achieve. No sooner had she attempted to climb the podium with Loukas' assistance when she fainted and everything from there on, became a mystery till she opened her eyes some hours later.

"You are awake," Louka said. He was seated next to her on the three-seater sofa.

Even before she could register her immediate environment, her eyes first went slowly over her dress and a faint ray of relief washed over her when she noticed that her Gucci premiere gown was still adorning her body.

"Oh, dear." He adjusted and was now sitting close to where her head was propped on the armrest, holding her left cheek and smiling broadly down at her. "I was so worried."

Mudia could feel a lump form in her throat, and slowly, she pulled up on the sofa and got his worried hands off her in the most gentle way possible. Louka; she had known him for years and he was very popular back in the days for his journalistic works. A budding French journalist who touched down in Nigeria for his first-ever holiday but would soon fall in love with the country, so when his half-sister whom he had come with decided to stay back, he too, was happy to but not without constantly travelling to see the rest of the world as he was a Nomad - An unrepentant one at that.

Good looking, tall and skinny. She had always found him attractive, although not too attractive in every sense of the word. If you asked her, she didn't exactly have a type on paper. Didn't exactly know her spec and didn't exactly bother.

"Can you please help me with water?" She requested. Trying to jog her memory for details of what had happened some hours back.

"Sure." He got up and headed for the kitchen.

Her nose soon caught the smell of his lit Yankee candle, she knew it was because it was him who first gifted her a set back when he had just arrived in Nigeria for the first time and they had met and he had been too enthralled by her beauty to want to let go. He constantly got her gifts then, asked her out severally, and made it known to her that he would like for them to become exclusive in a relationship that only existed in his head. But all these she fell a deaf ear to because love didn't exist in her dictionary. She didn't do love and had only loved one person all her life but sacrificed the love at the altar of friendship and since that time, she could never bring herself to love anyone else. And again, she was fresh out of her situationship with Tomiwa, whom she got involved with after Oba, who happens to be her first love.

With Oba, she experienced love in its purest form, love that was all too unconditional and less judgemental. That made her feel alive, and made her fall more for herself and not just him. But her friend wanted him and she imagined she was one with a great heart and sacrificed her love for friendship. Only that she could never relate with that naive side of her now. She eventually got tired of that side of her, and killed and buried her - it was how she was able to forge ahead in her businesses. Become the serial mogul every young person aspires to be - except for lately, she was slowly losing her touch. Slowly becoming less and less confident in herself.

"Here."

Louka was back and offered her a tall glass of sparkling water. All she did in the few seconds that it got offered to her, was stare blankly at the glass as though she was trying to recollect what she needed to do with it.

"Don't want it any longer?" He asked.

She shook her head and reached for it. Then sipped slowly from it till she no longer felt the need to.

"You were moving up the podium and suddenly collapsed against the step. I first made a stop at the clinic before I got you here. You got everyone worried sick and people are still asking questions and want to know what is wrong."

She sighed. "What do they care?"

She hadn't missed the hint of disbelief in his eyes.

"You sure as hell know they care. You are currently trending in first place on Twitter. Your fans genuinely want to know what is wrong. So let me be their access and ask, is there something you are not telling me?"

No, he wanted to be the one to offer help. So he could slide his tongue against hers and taste the inside of her mouth.

"If there was something do you think now is the right time to talk about it?" She instantly felt the need for a drink. Vodka, sex on the beach, tequila, anything. Her throat was dry and the water she had didn't help quench the thirst she now had for those drinks. She needed to push something tough down her throat.

"I'm sorry, I should have waited for you to heal first, but I'm just so worried and want to act fast, should in case something else comes up."

He wasn't sorry. He had been calculating and didn't quite use his common sense. Fuck came first in that calculation of his. She knew.

"Do you pray for something else to happen?" Mudia was up on her feet. Her fuzzy feet dug into his rug. She had always found it odd that he still kept a rug despite the flat being tiled. Curiosity took the better part of her from there on and her eyes began to roam around the small-sized living room, she wanted to see if there were any changes. And of course, there was, but apart from the new autumn green velvet 3-seater sofa, nothing else in the room was new or had a shade of colour as bright as that of the sofas. All she saw was brown. Brown here and then as before. Something like a comfortable abode of a struggling Korean. The kind seen in their soap operas. But the home smelled divine. She had to give him that. And she loved the feel, the red and orange lanterns brought to the room.

"Mudia you know I am trying here." His voice was now rid of the comfort it bore earlier on. "But if you don't want me to care, I can as well stop trying. Like why do I have to kill myself for anyone?"

Mudia chuckled. Amused that he was still the same as she knew him. He was quirky, talented and quite a charmer on stage but his anger mostly got the better part of him and in those moments, things like trying to get her to date him or making love to her were no longer in view. "Where have you been hiding that mean side of you?" She asked.

She got no response, instead, he walked away and in the direction of the kitchen, when he reappeared, he had a bottle of wine under his arm and two glasses in his hands.

He settled the glasses on the table, then soon enough opened the bottle of wine, and then filled both glasses with it.

He offered her a glass. She hesitated before receiving it. It wasn't exactly what she wanted but thought it would suffice.

"But, what is wrong with you? Now I am asking as a concerned friend."

"Not because you want to fuck me whilst making me moan your name?"

He shut his eyes, savouring the words and smiling sheepishly to himself. Next, he dropped the glass of wine in his hand and edged closer to Mudia on the sofa.

"And yet you won't let me in. You know what I want and I know you want it too. But won't let me in."

Mudia started to her feet. "Don't get ahead of yourself Louka." She warned sternly but not without acknowledging to herself that there was indeed something between them, a creative spark, maybe. She barely looked back at him before she spoke again. "We can't work for a number of reasons and the most recent being that I'm moving. I'm going far away from Lagos. I feel the need to start life afresh, on a clean slate..."

"We can still make this work..."

"Away from the prying eyes of people..."

"Your fans you mean, people who love and adore you. People who would kill for you."

She turned to face him at once. "That's the problem, I don't want them killing for me." She stopped to catch her breath and continued speaking shortly. "I'm leaving for my hometown, Benin. I want to experience Benin before..." She stopped once again, then suddenly pulled her face up in a bright smile. "Don't miss me too much, I imagine how much difficulty you might encounter from not seeing me for so long. Because my instincts tell me I'd be gone for so long." She said. Trying to mask the emotion in her eyes.

Louka scoffed. "Now, woman, I think it's my turn to tell you not to get ahead of yourself. I have girls at my beck and call, they would keep me occupied and who knows I might wife one before you get back."

Mudia mused. "Typical Louka, I know that's your ego talking." Her gaze sought his eyes but he had been too busy to lock gazes with her. She turned to face the busy street ahead from where she stood on the balcony, her eyes filled with tears she had been trying to keep in all evening.

*     *     *

She could feel the urge to gag, rising in her throat. Louka might have been right to ask what was wrong with her, only that she also didn't know what was. Maybe it was motion sickness now. Maybe it was the feeling that came with being tired, feeling hopeless and completely ready to put an end to the feeling.

Part of why she didn't want people to know that she was relocating. Let them make assumptions about her sudden disappearance. Let them come to forget her. The same way she rose to fame was the same way she had now badly wanted to end it all and vanish into thin air. She had a million reasons for wanting to end her pain and suffering but she imagined dying with her secrets being the best thing to do.

She thought about travelling lightly but found herself packing more bags. Maybe because she wanted a plausible story for her cause of death. Maybe because she wanted people to think that she had gone on a vacation somewhere and met with an untimely death - which wasn't far from the truth, except that it wasn't going to be accidental and she was going to be the one to take her own life.

She oddly found the city as fascinating as she used to. Later the bus would speed past more and more lush green bushes and plantation landscapes on the way. And she would come across one too many deserted ancient mud houses alongside new structural buildings that were all too phenomenal.

She wanted a place that would feel like the hometown she never had. Somewhere oddly different from the fast-paced city that was Lagos. Somewhere that was barely known. Somewhere it would be so easy to take her last breath. Surrounded by emptiness.

For some reasons, she had always been intrigued by the Bini culture. A part of her feared she was indeed rooted to the culture. She came to know her name as Imudia, no more than that, no surname, no trace to her real parents and had the woman who took her under her care not passed away, Mudia would not have come to know that the woman wasn't her biological mother. Little words were passed unto her by strangers about the mysteries surrounding her birth. But they made little sense to her. She was just thirteen. And no sooner had her guardian died than she got tossed into adulting from such a tender age. And she would later choose the surname "Osarobo" because it felt like the right thing to do or not.

Presently, she was sandwiched between strangers in a rickety bus that was yet to move to a place known as Uholor; which was their destination. When she arrived at the airport, she had initially boarded a cab but it broke down on the way and the driver apologized severally, telling her how she could break the journey and she took to his advice against her better judgement of doing so.

She had worn a simple outfit of jeans, a white spaghetti top and an African prints kimono. She had an easy footwear to match and her bags were jam-packed somewhere in the boot alongside other passengers' bags.

A cold wind soon blew roughly over the window, and with it came the stale smell of rotten fish. She turned her head away from the window at once, instantly fishing for her face mask in her handbag.

A passenger soon climbed onto the bus, looking at the vacant seat next to her and the others around them. He seemed to have been contemplating on which one to settle for. She wished against all odds, that he wouldn't choose hers. He smelled like shoe polish and something else she couldn't place her fingers on. And it didn't help that she constantly felt the need to gag rising in her throat from time to time.

"Good afternoon madam." He said, flashing his cream-coloured teeth at her.

She swallowed even as he occupied the vacant seat next to her. He was going to be her seat partner for the rest of the journey.

Having worn her face mask, she shut her eyes and relaxed her head against the window. And didn't wake up until some minutes later to the voice of a suave man in a dapper outfit and he bore a striking similarity with a man she had gone on a date with once in Piccadilly Gardens in Machester, but for his smooth face without the trace of a scar, her date; Tomiwa had on his face and that he wouldn't stop talking about back then on the date.

"Is anyone here?"

When he spoke, he was Yul Edochie and Frederick Leonard rolled into one. His voice was thick with age and charm.

She saved her thoughts and looked behind and around her for the man who had earlier been occupying the seat, as soon as her eyes caught sight of him, he flashed his cream-coloured teeth her way once again, she cringed and turned to look at the suave man in front of her.

"No." She replied.

"What did you say?" He had gotten closer to the seat.

"No one is..." She was saying but, stopped midway, simply because she realised that with her mask on, she might probably not be fully heard or understood, so she took it off. "It's free." She said. Her hands went over her hair shortly. She thought it must be a mess and combed through it with her fingers.

"Seen the driver?"

She was just about to fasten her face mask around her face but stopped shortly, deciding there and then to have it replaced in her bag. She reached instead for her shades and wore them.

"We spoke shortly, minutes after I first arrived at the park."

"Hmm." He nodded to her words and then looked around him. "Just two seats left to be occupied. It might take eternity or not, we just have to wait to find out." He said without a trace of smile on his face.

The more he spoke, the more drawn she was to his voice and the way he spoke. But she was far from showing that she was. She swept her eyes across him, he was wearing shorts which showed his muscular and hairy legs. He seemed like those suave old men who would always want to cheat nature. He appeared to be somewhere around 40 years but was as agile as ever. Not like the age meant that one was incredibly old.

His face. It was what gave his likely age away. Again, her mind went back to the date with Tomiwa in Machester. Despite the scar that was missing from his face, he reminded her of him. The date with Tomiwa had been the best date she had been on with any guy and they met up for more meals and steamy dates. But they never got exclusive and their dates went on and on even as she made casual visits to Machester until she came to learn of his engagement to another girl. It didn't make sense to her then, it didn't make much sense now either.

Throughout her conversations with Tomiwa, Fiyin, the girl he had later engaged, never came up. Not like she expected him to admit to seeing someone else. Although It seemed more like he had cheated on her but even her knew he hadn't. They were never exclusive, they never even moved things up another level. So saying he had been cheating on her the whole time, would mean her lying. But they shared a kiss once. On their first date. She had suffered all these years from not knowing if he ever loved her. If he felt even the slightest twinge of affection for her. A part of her wishes that they had remained warm friends and the other half knew she had done the right thing by cutting him off completely.

It seemed more like he had been using her. That he knew what he was doing and had simply been leading her on for no reason. For Tomiwa, she had been willing to break her rule of never getting intimate after Oba, but she soon came to loathe that option and had never gotten intimate till now.

"Sorry." Her seat partner said.

He had just tossed something through the window and for the split seconds that their bodies had gotten in contact, she felt a surge of something unfamiliar, wave through her. She didn't want to be feeling that way. She wanted the unknown feeling dead on arrival even before it got a chance to develop into something worst. If not for anything, she didn't want to feel anyway for someone who bore a striking resemblance with the younger version of the last man that left her pretty shattered. Again, she was going to take her life, so what was the point of it all?

Like someone with an awkward yearbook with photos lying idly on his lap, she caught him one too many times, staring at her. He seemed to have something on his mind, something he wanted to say to her.

It made her heart beat just a little faster.

"Can I help you with something?" She asked. She could no longer help it.

He shook his head, then turned to face the opposite direction.

"Na only you never buy my market." The passenger with the cream-coloured set of teeth said, reappearing before her and thrusting a bottle of mixed herb into her hands. She looked up at him, her breath catching in her throat. She hadn't noticed him come up to her and was a bit rattled by his gestures.

"Shey you don hear wetin I talk about the product?" He flashed her his cream-coloured set of teeth once again, holding the edge of her seat with one hand and holding the edge of the seat in front with the other.

For a split second, she was confused, unsure what she needed to do or say. He had completely taken her off guard and she was yet to recollect herself.

"Carry your product dey go." Her seat partner said, reaching for the bottle of the mixed herb in her hands aggressively and tossing it back at the seller. "Driver, stop!" He said next.

He intrigued her. She wished he didn't, but he did, but she would soon dismiss the thoughts when he shouted back at her.

"I told you before, this is where you are to alight." Before the driver had ignited the engine earlier that day, she had informed him by way of inquiry of the place she was heading to and he had nodded without further uttering a word.

"Oh, I'm so sorry." She said and took calculated steps out of the bus. The driver was just behind the back of the bus and soon called for her to come identify her bags. She did as she was told and was soon standing across the tiled road to a lonely bush path. Fear enveloped her, especially after noticing how quiet the entire place was, she looked from her left to right and couldn't see any other vehicle coming, save for only the bus she alighted from driving away. She felt tempted to run after the bus but didn't.

She braced up and then she picked up her bags, which came as a great discomfort to her and as she made to drop them on the ground, a motorcyclist appeared before her.

"Where?" He asked.

She was stunned and felt a great deal of unease. Having adjusted her handbag to the middle of her arm and releasing the arm with which to drag the box, she rolled up the sleeves of her kimono. "Abeg wait make I check am." She said. Fishing her trouser pocket for her phone. "Uholor." She said.

The motorcyclist hissed dryly. "Na Uholor you dey so." He said and zoomed off.

Mudia swallowed. She slowly replaced the phone in her pocket and soon walked across the road to the lonely path with lush green bushes.

"I can turn back, right?" she kept asking herself even as she walked quite uneasily through the bush path, constantly looking back and forth for any other person or moving vehicle but for another fifteen minutes, she had been the only one walking and she was soon walking past what seemed like a thick forest. She jolted in her movement, slowly placing the bags on the ground, trying to catch her breath and calm her racing heart. She had such little time to think. Her mind was in a million places.

She wanted to convince herself that she wasn't scared at the moment but found herself moving back and fast away from the forest, abandoning her bags in the process but no sooner had she moved back that she almost collided with a car, she turned around at once, fear enveloping her entire system.

"You have a death wish or something?" The driver asked, even as he stepped down from the car.

A sigh of relief escaped her. It was the same suave man that had sat next to her on the bus.