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Every time I looked at my bank balance, I saw Akosiwa’s eyes. Every time I drank expensive champagne, it tasted like the bitter tea of Maman Dossou. I organized parties to drown out the silence. I bought jewelry to hide the shivering of my skin.
For three years, I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought the invisible world had been satisfied with its payment.
I was wrong. The dead don’t sleep. They wait.
The Third Anniversary
The haunting began on the exact three-year anniversary of her death.
It started with the footsteps. Light, bare feet on marble tiles. I would wake up in the middle of the night, Kojo sleeping soundly beside me, and I would hear it. Tap. Tap. Tap. Coming from the hallway.
I would check the house. Nothing.
Then came the lullaby. It was a song our mother used to sing to us. A soft, haunting melody about a bird that lost its way. I would hear it humming from the vents, or coming from the garden at 3:00 AM.
“Kojo, do you hear that?” I asked one night, clutching the silk sheets.
“Hear what, Adjoa? It’s just the wind in the palms. You’re working too hard.”
But then, the mirrors started.
I couldn’t wash my hands without seeing her behind me. I couldn’t look in the rearview mirror of my Mercedes without seeing her in the back seat, her yellow dress stained with the red earth of our betrayal.
I had all the mirrors in the house removed. I told Kojo it was a new “spiritual trend” I was following. He looked at me with concern, but he loved me too much to argue.
Then, she started talking to our son.
Émile was three. He was the joy of my life, the only thing that made me feel human. One afternoon, I found him in his playroom, laughing and talking to the corner.
“Who are you talking to, Émile?”
“The lady,” he said, pointing a sticky finger at the empty air. “The Tata. She says she’s my auntie. She says she has a present for me.”
“What present?” I whispered, my heart freezing.
“A story,” Émile said. “She tells me stories about a sister who was a wolf.”
I grabbed Émile and ran out of the room. I locked him in the nursery with three nannies. I screamed at them never to leave him alone.
I went to find Maman Dossou. I needed to end this. I needed to pay more. I would give half my fortune. I would give it all.
I found the alley. But the house was gone. Not just empty—gone. There was only a pile of ash and an old man sitting on a crate.
“Where is she?” I demanded.
The old man looked at me with eyes that were as milky as Maman Dossou’s had been. “She was never here, child. She was just a mirror. You saw what you wanted to see. You gave what you wanted to give. Now, you must live with what you are.”
The Destruction
The collapse was as fast as the rise.
It started with my warehouse. A massive stock of luxury fabrics, worth millions. There had been no rain, no broken pipes. But when the manager opened the doors, the entire stock was soaked. The water was red, smelling of the earth of our village. The roof was dry.
“It’s a curse,” the workers whispered. They refused to enter.
Then the clients left. One by one, they called to cancel. They said they had “bad dreams” about doing business with me. They said they saw a woman in a yellow dress standing in my office.
In six months, I was bankrupt.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was Kojo.
He woke up one night to find the walls of our bedroom covered in writing. It wasn’t ink. It was traced in something dark and foul.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT SHE DID?
Kojo looked at me with a horror I will never forget. “Adjoa… what is happening? Who is Akosiwa? Why is our son singing lullabies about a sacrifice?”