TDoCAJ 1: 1.2

Growing up, love in her house looked like an apology with a gift attached, then a promise, then the same thing again in a different order. Her father had perfected the sequence over decades and multiple households, which should have been a cautionary tale in real time, except that nobody around her ever treated it as one.

Chief Oyeyemi Ade-John had met the love of his life in his twenties, which was where his love story diverged from his daughter Kiiti's. The love of his life had agreed to marry him. Sade Nelson, now Mrs Ade-John, first iteration: two daughters, a house in Ikoyi, and what was apparently a happy enough arrangement until her husband produced a son with one 'Bidemi Ogunyemi and declined to mention it. Mrs Ade-John had found out, these things outing as they were wont to do, had gotten comprehensively furious, and left. Ms Ogunyemi, spooked by the drama she'd triggered, had flounced off as well. Her father had run solo for roughly three years and made what Kiiti could only imagine had been very enthusiastic use of the freedom.

Then Sade Nelson had reconsidered. She was heading back. She'd almost made it through the door when her father had sat her down and explained, with what she assumed was great regret, that he'd gone and married ‘Bidemi Ogunyemi. ‘Bidemi, it turned out, had beaten her to it and also reconsidered, and was about to be Mrs Ade-John the Second.

Furious, Sade had left again while 'Bidemi blithely proceeded to have three more children for him: two boys and Fade.

Her father, apparently not yet satisfied with the complexity of his arrangements, had by this point been running a quiet parallel situation with a graduate student completing an internship at his company. Ms Zainab Olubanjo. Kiiti's mother. When their son, Kiitan, arrived, he'd kept it discreet. Five years later, he'd gotten tired of discreet and had brought Zainab home officially as Mrs Ade-John: chapter three, which was how Kiiti had entered the picture. Their honeymoon baby, if you could call it that, given that he'd managed to get both ‘Bidemi and yet another woman, Ms Eno Coker, pregnant in the same window. Eno had not stayed long enough to become a permanent fixture. She'd died when her daughter, Dedi, was nine. But for a hot stretch in her father's history, Kiiti, Fade, and Dedi had been born within months of each other, which was — she had no word for what that was.

None of their mothers had lived under the same roof. The children spent the school term with their respective mothers in separate houses built on the same massive family estate, sauntering in and out of their father's main house during the holidays. Every now and then, a random kid would materialize in the main house and be introduced as "your new brother, Wale" or "your maybe sister, Kemi," but when their father eventually tired of whoever their mother happened to be, they'd fade to black.

The estate was large enough that each household had its own walls, its own gate, its own careful arrangement of distance, but the women had sorted themselves into their own configurations regardless. Kiiti's mother and 'Bidemi, Fade's mother, had built something that looked, from the outside, like an older-younger sister situation, warm enough that their children had grown up in and out of each other's houses. Both had maintained a workable civility with Eno, Dedi's mother, who'd refrained from joining the harem, raising Dedi independently before she'd died from a sickle cell crisis.

Sade, the first wife, was a different matter entirely. Momma considered her a strategic operator who'd tried to return to her estranged husband specifically to produce a male heir. The first son from the first wife, never mind the boys who'd already arrived before her. And Sade considered Momma a woman who'd clawed her way to being Chief's favorite by unnatural means, which she was not shy about implying with pointed remarks about juju and jazz at every available opportunity, to everyone's private entertainment.

Her father, meanwhile, remained her father. Pushing eighty now and showing no inclination to slow down. The consummate philanderer, her brother Kiitan called him, the words carrying more affection than they probably should have.

At thirteen, she'd asked Momma why she'd married him. Not tactfully — she hadn't yet developed the tact — and she couldn't remember exactly how the question had come out, only that it had carried an edge she hadn't quite meant.

Momma had looked at her for a moment, then patted the couch.

Because I love your daddy, my darling.

Kiiti pressed. But it doesn't look like he loves you the same way. If he did, it'd just be you.

Her mother had smiled ruefully. He's a generous man, your dad. With everything, including his love. And luckily for me and him, I wasn't raised to be greedy. I was raised to share. She'd paused, then laughed a little, at herself. I won't lie to you though, Kiiti. It is better when you don't have to.

She'd understood later what her mother meant by raised to share. Momma had grown up in a polygamous home, her own mother dead before she could remember, an only child adrift in a house full of stepmothers and half-siblings she described, on the rare occasions she described them at all, as people who had taught her very early that love was a losing game.

The woman who'd emerged from that had very little patience for rules about what women were and weren't supposed to want. She'd dated her decrepit neighbor. She'd dated her professor. She'd dated her father's friend. She'd had her affairs after she'd married Kiiti's father too. Kiiti had found out at fifteen from a gossip tabloid, a short item about a Chief's wife and an oil tycoon and intimate dinners at twilight hours that hadn't required much connecting of dots. She'd asked her brother Kiitan about it. With the weirdest expression on his face, he'd told her to shut up and mind her business, like Momma wasn't her business. Ignoring him, she'd asked Momma directly if she'd read it. Momma had said she had, and what about it, and then laughed at Kiiti's expression. Are you worried Ofon Pepple is about to be your new dad? You shouldn't worry. I'm not looking for replacements…yet.

And that had been that.

She'd never judged her mother for any of it. Momma loved her and Kiitan with a ferocity that left no room for doubt. If affairs were how she filled the gaps her husband couldn't or wouldn't, Kiiti didn't begrudge her that.

What she'd decided, somewhere in the accumulated evidence of her childhood, was that she was going to be different. Not superior — she wasn't naive enough to think herself immune — more deliberate. Not her father's bottomless hunger. Not her mother's rotating cast of borrowed lovers. Not the cycle of love, burn, bust, repeat she'd grown up watching with a sickened fascination. She would find one person, a decent person, and she would stay.

She got one of three right. She stayed, spending the better part of five years on the most recognizable wheel imaginable, running it with the same grim dedication her parents had but without their unsentimental acceptance that this was anything other than what it was.