The first thing people noticed about Alero was her eyes. Wide, curious, rimmed with lashes too thick for a child, they mirrored a sorrow far too old for someone so young. Her father said she had her mother's eyes-haunted and beautiful. But Alero had never seen them herself. Her mother had vanished the night she was born.

There were no photographs, no love letters, no vague perfume-laced memories tucked into drawers. Only silence. Her name wasn't spoken, not in stories, not in anger, not even in forgiveness. Just a blank space in their two-person household that no amount of noise could ever fill.

She grew up in Warri, a town known for its grit, its laughter, and its fire. But Alero's home was a small flat behind her father's mechanic workshop, quiet as a tomb. Her father, Raymond, had loved once. So fiercely, in fact, that it broke him. The day her mother disappeared with her hospital gown and nothing else, something inside him shattered like a windshield in a head-on collision.

He never remarried.

He raised Alero like a soldier raises his only heir-with stern kindness and survivalist tenderness. He brushed her hair but didn't braid it. He cooked noodles but forgot to slice the onions small enough. He taught her how to change tires before she learned how to write a full sentence.

But he was there. Broken but present. "People leave," he'd say, looking off into spaces Alero couldn't follow. "But I won't. Not unless I stop breathing."

By ten, Alero had stopped asking about her mother. The answers never came, and the questions only made her father's eyes water, just enough to embarrass them both. Instead, she folded her wonderings into origami birds she kept in a box under her bed, like prayers that might one day be answered.

By sixteen, Alero knew what abandonment tasted like. It wasn't just her mother's absence-it was in the whisper of friends who invited each other for sleepovers but skipped her, in the aunties at church who pitied her but never got too close. It was in the way the world treated motherless girls like they were half-finished stories.

Then came Jude.

Tall, honey-skinned, the kind of boy who smiled with his whole face. He wasn't just her first kiss-he was her first everything. They met in their SS2 year. She helped him with literature, he helped her feel seen.

"I love your mind," he told her once.

"No one's ever said that to me."

"Well, they should. You're magic."

But magic can be a trick.

At eighteen, just before their final WAEC papers, Jude's mother found the letters he wrote her, the ones where he promised to marry Alero, to take her far from Warri, maybe to Lagos or Ghana. He never spoke to her again.

Her father noticed the silence in her eyes. "Heartbreak?" he asked, placing a bowl of rice in front of her.

She nodded. He didn't offer advice. He simply placed his hand over hers and squeezed once.

"I'm still here."

University was an escape.

She got into the University of Benin to study Sociology. Not because she wanted to, but because she needed a reason to leave.

Her father cried the day she left, not dramatically, just a soft, surrendering kind of grief. He held her tighter than usual.

"You'll be fine," he whispered. "You've survived worse."

Benin brought freedom, but it also brought men.

Taye was different-or so she thought. Suave, older, final-year engineering student. He spoke Yoruba like poetry and kissed her like a secret he was desperate to keep. But after a year of dating, he grew colder, as if the warmth she offered him became an inconvenience.

"I didn't ask you to love me this much," he said once, during one of their many fights.

Alero laughed bitterly. "I never asked to love you at all."

They ended with a slam of a door and an ache in her chest. That was the first time she cut her hair. Something symbolic. Something desperate.

After school, the world swallowed her whole.

She bounced from job to job-receptionist, sales rep, content assistant for a sketchy influencer who paid her in exposure. Lagos chewed her dreams slowly, like hot eba, and then spat them out.

Then she met Nelson.

Her friends called him intense. She called him necessary.

He was older, confident, wealthy, with a tragic backstory he recited like scripture-cheated on by an ex-wife, abandoned by his mother. "We're both broken," he told her. "We can be whole together."

Alero didn't know it then, but she was marrying her demons.

They married quietly. No fanfare. No white gown. Just court papers and a lunch at a restaurant that served overcooked jollof rice.

Her father didn't attend. He had a stroke two months earlier and was learning to walk again. "You don't need my blessing," he croaked. "Just my prayers."

Nelson was good at first. Attentive. Generous. But soon, shadows returned.

It started with control-what she wore, who she spoke to. Then came the anger-smashed glasses, slammed doors. Then came the apologies-the expensive bags, the sobbing, the begging.

"I'm nothing without you," he'd say.

"I think you're everything I should run from," she whispered once, but only when he was asleep.

The worst night happened two years in. She came home late from work. He didn't speak. Just stared. Then without warning, he threw her phone across the room.

"Why don't you listen?" he roared.

She cowered in a corner, sobbing silently, praying like her father taught her. That night, she packed a bag and left. She didn't even wear shoes.

She found herself at her father's bedside, her lips trembling.

"I married a nightmare," she said.

He nodded. "But you woke up. That's what matters."

Three days later, her father died.

Grief was a black hole, but something unexpected bloomed in its belly.

She was pregnant.

She almost terminated. She almost ran. But something stopped her. Maybe it was her father's voice in her head. Maybe it was the emptiness of knowing she'd have no one left if she walked away from this child too.

So she stayed.

And on a cool Harmattan morning in December, she gave birth to a boy. She named him Raymond.

He came out screaming, fists clenched, eyes wide.

"You've been here before," she whispered, cradling him. "Haven't you?"

He stopped crying the moment she touched his cheek. And in that moment, the weight lifted.

Not all of it. But enough.

Enough to let her breathe.

Enough to make her believe.

Years passed.

Raymond grew tall, with his mother's eyes. Alero never told him about the abandonment, about the pain. She told him stories about his grandfather, about strength, about how they made soup with five naira and faith.

One day, he asked her, "Mummy, are you sad?"

She smiled. "Sometimes. But then you smile, and I remember that God didn't forget me."

And that was the truth.

She had been married to her demons.

But her son? Her son was her miracle.

And this time, she would not run.