The name lands like ash. You have not heard it in his voice before.
When you met him, you told him to call you Eden.
It had started as an accident. The receptionist at the music school had asked your name, and you’d said, “Adaeze, but most people…” Then you saw the flicker in her face, the one people get when they’re trying not to show surprise at scars, and you changed course mid-sentence. “Eden. Most people call me Eden.”
Nobody had ever called you that before. But after the fire, your old name belonged to hospital forms, legal complaints, and whispered pity in church. Eden sounded cleaner. Like a place after ruin. Like a fresh start you did not feel but desperately wanted.
Obinna looks at you steadily. “I knew your name before you gave me the other one.”
The betrayal widens, becomes something with hallways and locked rooms.
“So that’s why?” you ask. “You heard some story about a burned girl and decided to what? Find her? Save her? Marry her?”
His face flinches for the first time. Good. Let him feel the heat too.
“No,” he says. “That’s not what happened.”
“Then what happened?”
“Months after Chika told me about you, she died.”
The anger in your chest stumbles.
