Chapter Fourteen: The Echo of Secrets
That night, I confronted my mother.
We were seated outside, beneath the acacia tree behind our home in Kitale. My father had gone to bed early, the exhaustion of work and grief still heavy in his bones. My younger sisters played in the house, their laughter thin and fragile.
"Did Parker ever mention someone named Ayana?" I asked.
My mother went still.
Then she nodded, slowly. "Once. Long ago. Before you were born. She claimed to have had his child, but her family moved away. He was too young. It didn't make sense."
"Did you ever believe her?"
She looked away. "I didn't want to."
There it was.
A fracture in the truth.
Parker might have carried guilt his entire life—for a child he never knew, or one he was told wasn't his. And now he was dead, and that child, if they existed, was a ghost in more ways than one.