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Not romance. Not yet.
But something simpler and somehow more sacred: trust.
By noon they had enough wood to sell. They carried the bundles to market together.
The moment Joy entered the square, the usual whispers began.
“The cursed girl.”
“She’s back.”
“And who is that with her?”
Jason heard everything.
He looked at the people staring, at the way they shifted away from Joy as though she carried disease, and anger rose in him so sharply it almost embarrassed him.
“Why are they calling you cursed?” he asked quietly.
Joy set down her bundle and kept her eyes on the ground.
“It’s a long story.”
“I want to hear it.”
So she told him. Not dramatically, not to invite pity, but simply, as though reporting weather that had lasted too long.
By the time she finished, Jason could barely contain himself.
He had spent his whole life among wealth, influence, and polished cruelty. But there was something uniquely monstrous about watching a village call a kind woman cursed because tragedy had found her more than once.
When they sold the wood, Joy counted the money twice before handing him the coins for the call.
At the old phone booth, he dialed from memory.
The line rang once.
Then a man answered.
“Jason?”
His shoulders shook.
“Dad.”
What followed was a rush of relief. Questions. Explanations. Coordinates. Assurances. Jason spoke quickly, his eyes filling as he said the words, “A girl saved me. If not for her, I would be dead.”
When he hung up, he turned to Joy with a face transformed by hope.
“He’s coming.”
Joy nodded.
“That’s good.”
“You’re coming with me.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I’m serious. You cannot stay here.”
“This is my home.”
“No,” he said gently, looking around at the people who still watched her with suspicion. “This is where they buried you alive without killing you. That is not the same thing.”
Before she could answer, a new sound entered the square.
A loud, churning thunder from above.
The villagers gasped and stumbled backward.
Joy looked up and saw the helicopter circling down toward the open field beyond the market. Dust spiraled. Children screamed. Goats scattered. Men shielded their eyes.
When it landed, the entire village seemed to stop breathing.
From the helicopter stepped an older man in a tailored suit, silver hair neat, face drawn tight by hours of fear.
He saw Jason and all dignity left him.
“Jason!”
“Dad!”
They met halfway and embraced with the kind of desperation only near-loss can produce.
Then Jason turned and brought the man to Joy.
“Dad, this is Joy. She saved me.”
The older man took both her hands in his.
His eyes were wet.
“My dear,” he said, voice unsteady, “you saved my son’s life.”
Joy, who had been called cursed more times than blessed, suddenly did not know where to look.
“I only did what anyone should do.”
“No,” he said softly. “Not anyone. Someone brave. Someone good.”
All around them, the villagers whispered again.
But now the tone had changed.
That was how quickly the world remeasured people once wealth entered the scene.
The same mouths that had spat superstition were now stunned into respect.
It should have satisfied her more than it did.
Instead, Joy only felt tired.
Tired of needing someone else’s status to make people question their own cruelty.
Still, when Jason held out his hand and asked her again to come with them, she looked down at her hut in the distance, at the life that had given her little but pain, and she placed one palm over her belly.
Maybe, she thought, this is what change feels like before it becomes real.
So she took his hand.
The helicopter rose with them inside it, and as Umuoma shrank beneath her, Joy cried.
Not because she was sad to leave.
Because for the first time, leaving did not feel like exile.
It felt like deliverance.
The city overwhelmed her at first.
Lagos seemed to have been built from noise, glass, ambition, and traffic. Nothing stayed still. Not the cars. Not the people. Not even the air. Jason’s father—Mr. Adelik, though he quickly insisted she call him Papa if she wished—brought her to their estate, and the sheer size of it nearly made her step backward.
The guest house they gave her was larger than every place she had ever lived combined.
There was hot water.
Soft towels.
A bed so thick she feared sinking into it.
A mirror large enough to reflect not only her body but her disbelief.
That first night she walked slowly through the rooms touching the furniture, the curtains, the polished table surfaces, as if the whole place might vanish if she moved too quickly.
Then she sat on the bed, placed both hands over her stomach, and whispered to her unborn child, “Maybe this world has room for us after all.”
Jason recovered physically within days, but something deeper had changed in him.
He kept finding reasons to be near her.
To check if she had eaten.
To ask if she needed anything.
To laugh when she misunderstood some city custom.
To sit beside her in the garden and listen when she spoke of her parents, her banishment, her fear of raising a child without protection.
When he offered her work as his assistant at the company, she thought he was joking.
“I don’t know office work.”
“You can learn.”
“I barely know how to use a computer.”
“You can learn that too.”
“What if I fail?”