Chapter 1 The return

The village had not changed.

Time, that tireless sculptor of cities, had passed softly over the quiet countryside, leaving the fields intact and the hills unspoiled. The road, now sun-dappled and lined with eucalyptus, welcomed her with the faint rustle of wind through branches - the same whispering voice that had lulled her to sleep in her girlhood summers.

Adeline Mensah stepped out of the dusty taxi, her leather satchel pressed against her chest like a shield. Her heels crunched against the gravel path that led up to her grandmother's old house - a two-storey dwelling of red clay bricks and wooden shutters, made modest by time but made holy by memory. A crow cawed in the distance, startling her. She exhaled.

She was thirty-three, successful by all external measures - a well-published literature lecturer at the University of Ghana, elegant, articulate, and discreetly broken.

The air smelled of jasmine and impending rain.

She unlocked the front door, the metal creaking like an old friend protesting her absence. Inside, dust had made itself a quiet inhabitant, veiling bookshelves and windowsills like mourning cloth. She stood in the centre of the parlour, letting her eyes trace the framed photograph above the mantle - her grandmother, standing in a field of lavender, eyes closed, laughing into the breeze.

Adeline smiled. The first true smile in weeks.

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By dusk, she had unpacked and swept through the main hall. The routine of physical labour was almost therapeutic - it asked nothing of her heart, only her hands. As she dusted off the floral china in the glass cabinet, she heard a knock at the back door.

Not the front - the back. The village way.

She opened it cautiously. A tall man stood there, dressed in a loose white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, arms veined and sun-kissed. In one hand, he held a small basket of freshly cut lavender and marigolds.

"You're Adeline," he said - not a question, but a statement drawn with certainty.

"Yes?"

"I'm Nathaniel. I tend to the garden next door. Your grandmother and I-well, we shared soil." He glanced over her shoulder at the once-blooming flower beds behind the house, now wilted with neglect. "I thought you might want these. She used to say marigolds help the house remember joy."

Adeline blinked. The softness of his voice contrasted the firmness of his stance. He was not a man given to pleasantries, she sensed, but one who meant what he said. That kind of man made her nervous.

"Thank you," she replied, accepting the basket. Their fingers did not touch.

He nodded, then stepped back without waiting for tea or chat, disappearing behind a tall hedge of rosemary that marked the boundary of her late grandmother's land.

---

That night, Adeline sat on the back porch wrapped in a shawl, sipping tea as the sun gave its last sigh beyond the hills. The scent of lavender drifted around her, mingling with the soft notes of crickets and distant cowbells.

Nathaniel Boadi.

She would remember that name. Something about him - his restraint, his quiet grief, perhaps - felt like a question she had once asked and never answered.

But she hadn't come here for men.

She had come here to forget one.

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