BENEATH

Chapter 5 — Ile Omi

Picture this you’re listening to The playlist for this chapter it’s not offical just songs to rhyme with this chapter .

🎵 Playlist: Labyrinth — Taylor Swift / Beneath Your Beautiful — Labrinth ft. Emeli Sandé

Chapter 5 Soundtrack 🎧

Beneath Playlist

Listen while reading.

“Some places are built with stone and steel.”

“Others are built with grief.”

“The difference is not always visible from the outside.”

—

Kainene

My heart would not settle.

That was the simplest way to say it — though simplest did not come close to accurate. It wasn’t one feeling. It was all of them at once, arriving without invitation and without order, overlapping in the way of voices in a room where everyone is speaking at the same volume. I sat in the passenger seat with my hands folded in my lap and tried to locate a single thread I could follow to its source.

I couldn’t.

Just the feeling. Persistent. Specific. The feeling of having lived something before that my memory had no record of — like reading a book and arriving at a page that your hands somehow already know the shape of.

God, I thought. Please. I need an answer. What is happening to me?

I pressed my thumbnail against the inside of my wrist — a small pressure, a small anchor — and stared at the road ahead.

“Want to share what’s going through your mind?”

His voice was quiet. No pressure in it. He kept his eyes on the road.

“Who knows,” he added, “I might have the solution.”

I shook my head slowly. “I doubt you would.” A pause. “I’ll share when I’m ready. For now I’m still trying to understand it myself.”

He looked like he wanted to press further. He didn’t. Instead he cleared his throat and let a moment pass before he spoke again.

“I’m sorry about Tiara.” He said it like he had been carrying the apology since the pavilion and had finally found a place to set it down. “She’s been like that since Sophy passed. I don’t understand it — after all this time, still. She’s never short of people who want her attention.” He shook his head once. “What makes it worse is that she and Sophy were inseparable. You couldn’t find one without the other.”

“That must be really hard for you,” I said.

He nodded. Said nothing further. The road thinned.

“Something about her sends chills down my spine,” I said — quietly, mostly to myself.

We both said it at the same moment:

“Be careful.”

I turned to look at him. He was already looking at me.

“She’ll think twice before crossing me,” he said. “She knows I don’t bluff.”

I turned back to the window. And the city fell away behind us.

—

The road changed first.

The wide, lit arterials of Lagos gave way to a laterite track that narrowed as it descended — rust-red earth, compact and quiet beneath the tyres. Cashew trees appeared on either side, their branches low and reaching, and beyond them the old fishing settlements of Epe where the air thickened with salt and the particular sweetness of green things breaking down in the heat. The lagoon was close. You could feel it before you could see it — a weight in the air, a deepening of the dark.

Then the track bent around the treeline and the land jutted out over the water and I saw it.

Three staggered tiers. Dark stone and weathered teak and floor-to-ceiling glass embedded so completely into the tropical overgrowth that for a moment I couldn’t tell where the house ended and the forest decided to continue. The façade was almost all shadow — charcoal concrete, black-framed glass throwing the jungle back at itself. But from inside, amber light bled warm through every panel. The mist was coming in off the lagoon, curling between the iroko trees in slow, unhurried coils.

The house glowed through it like a lantern dropped into deep water.

From a distance, it looked like it was on fire.

“Wow,”

I said it before I could stop myself. Barely above a breath.

“Umeh here,” Keside said. Quietly. Like the name of a place you say when you finally arrive somewhere you’ve been trying to reach.

He drove slowly down the final stretch of track. I pressed my palm to the glass and looked.

The lowest tier held a cantilevered infinity pool that extended from the hillside deck over nothing but canopy and dark air below. Its surface caught the sky above it — tonight a deep, bruised violet pressing into black — and at its edge the water simply ended, merging with the treeline as though the pool had always belonged to the jungle and the jungle had simply allowed the house to stand around it. Teak decking ran the full length of the terrace, darkened with age and warm underfoot even from a distance. Hammock nets hung from the overhead beams at angles over the water — wide, flat, woven the way the fishermen below wove their nets, piled with crushed linen cushions holding the shapes of people who had slept there and left. Copper lanterns stood at every post, their flames behind amber glass, and when the breeze moved through the trees they swayed, and the shadows swayed with them, and the whole terrace breathed.

The middle tier was where the house opened itself. Retractable glass walls folded away to let the forest fully in — or perhaps more accurately, abolished the idea of inside and outside as a distinction worth maintaining. The ceiling was dark coffered wood, high and hung with trailing plants descending in long green curtains along steel cables, spilling where they chose. Terracotta urns held palms that had long since exceeded any reasonable plan for their size. The furniture was spare and low — wide cream-linen sofas arranged around a hearth that was more ritual than practical in this heat but burning anyway, because fire does something to a room that electricity cannot replicate. The floors were pale stone throughout. Cool even in the humid press of the evening.

Everywhere: wet soil. Something flowering. Wood oil and woodsmoke and the sea.

And at the heart of the house — visible through the central corridor, enclosed beneath a grid of skylights set directly into the roof — an interior garden. Not a decorative one. A real one, that had been given room and time enough to exceed its original intentions. Vines had threaded themselves through the skylight frames and dangled into the room in loose, swaying trails. A shallow pool ran through the centre of the atrium — not for swimming, for something older and more instinctive than that, the way humans have always placed water near the places where they need to think. Flat river stones made a path across it, each one spaced just far enough apart to require attention, to keep you present. From the skylights on thick knotted ropes, two rattan swing chairs turned slowly in the air. A curved sofa sat half-hidden behind birds-of-paradise and monstera so large the leaves looked structural.

Light entered the atrium only from above.

At storm season, when the rain came down hard on the glass and the mist moved across the waterways outside, sitting in that room with the canopy swaying overhead, you could convince yourself you were the last person alive.

The top tier was a single bedroom. A white four-poster that stood in the room the way an altar stands in a church — central, deliberate, slightly too large. White linen and navy cotton, soft from repeated washing, layered without fuss. Wide-planked pale hardwood floors. The east wall opened entirely onto a balcony and from that balcony you saw not the city but the water. The long grey-green sprawl of the Atlantic where it met the lagoon. Fishing boats in silhouette. The pelicans that passed each morning in formation, quiet as secrets.

Lying in that bed with the doors open was to understand precisely how small you were against something very, very old.

The locals called it — without ever having been inside — ile omi.

Water house.

—

“Jidekene Opara designed it,” Keside said. “Provided the 3D models. Every sketch. We built it from the ground up, the two of us.”

I looked at him.

“That’s—” I stopped. Started again. “That’s genuinely impressive. I want to see the model.”

Then the realization arrived, quiet and slightly strange.

“Jidekene Opara,” I said slowly. “Is that — Kamara’s ex-husband?”

“The one and only.” He said it without looking at me. “Our circle is large. And small.” A pause. “Let me walk you in. I should warn you — Sophy’s photographs are here. Some of her things. I’ll have them moved to a separate room as soon as I can.”

I nodded. Said nothing.

He walked ahead and I followed, and I did not ask the question that had arrived with the information about Jidekene: that a man skilled enough to help build something this precise and this beautiful had not been able to build something that lasted with Kamara. That thought sat in the corner of my mind and I left it there for later.

—

Keside

The lawns were well trimmed, even at this hour. Four detached cottages arranged in a circular formation around the main house, each one facing the water, each one part of the original design — for staff, for guests, for the kind of life I had once imagined building here that had never quite arrived.

My feet stopped without deciding to.

The statue stood at the centre of the compound the way it had always stood — gold, life-sized, cast in the early months after she died when I had too much grief and too much money and nowhere useful to put either. Sophy in the posture she always had when she was thinking — chin slightly lifted, one hand at her collarbone, as though she was about to say something worth hearing.

She had never seen this place. She never got the chance. I had found the land in the early months of mourning, when movement was the only thing that worked — when sitting still meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering, and remembering meant —

I had acquired it before I knew what I would build. And then I built it.

Kainene had gone still beside me.

“Oh,” she said. Quietly. The sound of someone who has been caught off guard by something and has no performance prepared for it. “She’s so beautiful.” She looked at the statue for a long moment. “Does anyone know about this?”

Then: “She was so lucky to have been loved by you.”

“As I was,” I said, “to be loved by her.”

Footsteps on the stone path behind us.

Mrs. Akunna moved toward us from her cottage — still the same unhurried walk, still the same expression of someone who has seen enough of the world to find very little of it surprising. She had been my nanny before she became the head of the household. She shuttled between this compound and my father’s house with the same calm consistency she had brought to everything for as long as I could remember.

“Ndeewo, Nne anyi,” I said.

“Nnoo, kedu?”

“A din’ mma.”

She patted my back. Then she turned to Kainene.

She greeted her the way she greeted people she had already decided deserved warmth — directly, without preamble, pulling her into a hug before Kainene had time to prepare for it. Then she held her at arm’s length and looked at her face with the unhurried thoroughness of someone performing an assessment they had not been asked to perform.

“Such a beautiful Queen,” Mrs. Akunna said. Soft. Almost to herself. “Reminds me of Sophie.”

A pause.

“Just the quiet version.”

I watched Kainene go still.

Not the kind of still that is composed. The kind that happens when a body receives something it does not know how to process — a sudden, total suspension, like all the systems running simultaneously have encountered something they were not designed for and have paused to decide what to do next.

Her eyes rolled.

I moved before the thought completed. Both arms, one at her back, one at her knees — and I had her before the ground could.

“Doctor,” Mrs. Akunna said behind me, already moving, her voice its own kind of instruction. Her expression was something I registered and filed away for later — not surprise. Something older and more complicated than surprise.

She had always been swift. She had always been logical.

Tonight those qualities looked like something else.

—

Kainene

Light arrived before anything else.

Then the ceiling. Then the room around it — unfamiliar walls, warm amber from a lamp somewhere to my left, the smell of wood oil and salt air and something faintly floral I couldn’t name. I was on a sofa. The cushions beneath me were deep and linen-soft.

I closed my eyes again because of the pressure behind them.

Something moved beneath my head. Hands — careful and deliberate — lifting me gently, shifting, resettling me. The hands of someone paying close attention to the specific weight and position of a person they did not want to disturb.

“Kai.” His voice. Low. Close to where my ear was. “Please wake up.”

A beat. Then — quieter. The kind of quiet that lives below speech.

“Don’t do what Sophy did to me.”

His body shifted with the words. Something in the frame of him tightening and releasing at once.

“I have barely gotten to know you,” he said. “Give me that chance. To explore who you are — all of it. I don’t know if I have it in me to love again after her. But I can try to give you a good life. Friendship. Peace. That I can promise.” A pause. “So please don’t go. Not like this.”

His fingers moved along my jaw.

Slow. Tracing. The way you touch something fragile — not to hold it, just to know it is still there.

Every place he touched left something behind — a warmth that didn’t fade immediately, that lingered the way heat stays in stone after the sun has moved. His touch burned. Not badly. The way things burn when they are returning something to you that you did not know was missing.

I let my eyes open.

He was watching me with an expression I did not have a name for. Not relief entirely. Something larger than relief, and older.

“I heard that,” I said. My voice came out low and grazed at the edges.

Something moved across his face.

He brought me water. I sat up slowly, pressed one hand to my temple, and became aware, in the same moment, of the fabric against my skin. Not the gown from the engagement. Something else. Deep wine — a thick cotton night dress, thin-strapped, a small bow sitting at the chest, a robe of the same material draped over my shoulders.

I looked down at it. Then at him.

“Mrs. Akunna changed you,” he said, reading the question before I asked it. “I carried you in and placed you across her lap. She dressed you. I stood outside the door and handed the clothing in.” He paused. “I did not see you.”

He watched my expression very carefully.

“If I had,” he added, with a composure that was doing a great deal of heavy lifting, “I would probably be outside right now getting some air.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

“Drop the look,” he said. A sound came from him that was almost, almost a laugh. “We are not married under ideal circumstances but I will not touch you without your consent. Not unless it is a matter of life and death.” He tilted his head. “Out of curiosity — what would you have done if I had dressed you instead?”

“Prayed the ground would open,” I said.

“The ground won’t open, Kai.” The almost-laugh again. Warmer this time.

I stood slowly. Picked up the glass. Moved toward the kitchen, still taking in the space around me — the trailing plants, the pale stone floors, the amber glow of the copper lanterns through the glass. I set the glass on the counter and turned.

He had followed.

I became aware of this because he was extremely close and the kitchen was not a large room and he had closed the distance without announcing it. I turned and he was simply — there. Just inside the radius of every reasonable sense of personal space, in a black robe with nothing underneath it, the fabric open at the chest, droplets of water or sweat tracing slow lines down the architecture of him.

This man looked like Eros had filed a formal complaint.

The robe’s tie sat low at his waist. The trousers beneath hung at an angle that I was not going to think about.

I took a step sideways. He didn’t move. I took another.

The counter met my back.

I was between him and the cabinets and he had not moved a single inch and was looking at me with an expression that was completely unreadable and I was suddenly and comprehensively aware of every point of proximity between us.

My breathing had made a decision without consulting me.

His did the same thing.

Neither of us moved.

Neither of us spoke.

The lanterns on the terrace outside swayed in the breeze from the lagoon and the shadows moved with them and somewhere below the house the water was doing what water does at night — breathing, patient, old.

We were both standing at the edge of something.

Neither of us looked down.

—

🎵 Beneath Your Beautiful — Labrinth ft. Emeli Sandé

—

🍿 Barbie as Narrator — Has Jumped Into a Pool of Ice and Is Still on Fire

I need everyone to pause.

The house. ILE OMI. Three tiers of stone and glass and jungle and a man built this because he needed somewhere to put his grief and didn’t know what else to do with it. An infinity pool hanging over the treetops. An atrium where you can sit in the rain without getting wet. A bedroom where you fall asleep looking at the Atlantic.

That is not a house. That is a feeling poured into architecture.

And Jidekene Opara sketched every corner of it. The man Kamara divorced. A man brilliant enough to build this with his hands and his mind — who somehow could not build a life with her. This family has secrets stacked like cobwebs in a corner no one has touched in years. I am activating all of my skills. I am leaving no corner unswept.

Mrs Akunna’s face when Kainene fainted.

That expression.

Not surprise. Something older. Something that looked like recognition wearing a very careful mask. I am filing that away and I suggest you do the same.

And what he said while she was unconscious.

“Don’t do what Sophy did to me.”

This man. This man pressed his fingers along her jaw and made promises he didn’t plan to make, to someone he didn’t plan to need, in a house he built because he ran out of other ways to survive.

The kitchen scene. I have jumped into ice. I am still warm. The robe. The proximity. The counter. The breathing that made a decision without asking either of them first.

We are standing at the edge of something. Nobody is looking down yet.

Chapter 6. My sleeves are rolled. I am ready. Are you? 🖤🍿