CHAPTER FIVE: ADMIRATION OF THE OLD
HENRY'S POV
I've often been told that I look like my mother, Jane.
A woman whose beauty, grace, and resilience were the kind of things you heard about in stories, not just in the idle chatter of neighbors or distant
relatives.
My father, Mr. Daukon Ukariwo, rarely spoke of her with anything less than reverence, and I grew up tracing her legacy not only through fading photographs but through the choices my father made after her passing.
From what I've been told, she wasn't born into wealth or privilege.
Her family lived modestly, their existence grounded in values rather than riches.
Yet, what Jane lacked in material inheritance, she made up for in ambition and quiet elegance.
She was on her way to the bank the day my father's life is and eventually mine, took a drastic turn.
It was a coincidence, or perhaps fate, that brought them together.
My father, seated in the back of a sleek black Range Rover, had his driver slow to a halt when he spotted her walking along the sidewalk.
According to him, there was something about the way she moved, determined yet weighed down, like a woman carrying more than just her handbag.
He wound down the window.
"Hello, pretty lady. May I offer you a ride?" he had asked, not expecting much in return.
My mother, cautious but polite, had declined. "I'm almost at my destination," she replied, quickening her pace.
He asked for her number instead, persistent, yet gentle.
She gave it to him, half-reluctantly. "But don't bother me with calls," she had warned.
"I won't," he promised, though that was a promise no man in his right mind could keep.
My father wasn't the kind to chase shadows, but he felt compelled to follow her that day.
When she entered the bank, he had the driver park and decided to go in after her.
What he found inside was a woman on the verge of breaking.
Her poultry farm dream, something she had nurtured with all her savings and hope, was falling apart.
The bank had rejected her loan application due to insufficient collateral.
She was told, in the cold language of finance, that she had nothing of value.
She left the bank in silence, tears brimming in her eyes. My father followed.
"Hello, pretty" he called out once more.
She ignored him at first. But the sound of his footsteps behind her eventually made her turn. "You again?" she said, not amused.
"I forgot to ask your name," he said with a disarming honesty.
"You're following me just for that?" she asked sharply.
"No," he admitted. "I followed because the way you left that building, something about it felt... wrong."
She scoffed. "And what will you do if I told you my problems? Waste more time?" Her voice trembled.
But my father didn't retreat. Instead, he watched as her composure began to unravel.
Tears slid down her cheeks as if they'd been waiting too long to fall.
"Whatever it is," he said gently, "please talk to me. You don't have to go through it alone."
And that was the beginning.
She told him everything, how she had lost her family in a tragic accident the year before.
Her parents. Her siblings. Everyone. She had been the sole survivor, left to pick up the pieces with nothing but a dream of building a life through farming.
My father didn't offer empty platitudes.
Instead, he sat with her and listened. When she was done, he told her something he hadn't told anyone else that year.
"Last year," he said, "I too lost my
family, in a car crash. My parents, gone in an instant."
My mother looked up in shock. "You lost them too?" she whispered.
"Yes," he replied. "And like you, I had to wake up every day pretending that life made sense."
That moment, two strangers sitting on a public bench, bonded by grief and stripped of all pretenses, was where love began.
In the days that followed, my father couldn't get her out of his mind.
After his parents' burial, the family lawyer had presented him with his
father's will.
As the only child, everything, assets, businesses, investments, became his.
For months, he had done nothing with the wealth. But after meeting Jane, he knew where a portion of it was meant to go.
He approached her again, this time with a clear offer: the funds she needed to build her poultry business.
It wasn't charity, it was belief. He believed in her spirit, her ideas, and the way she refused to give up even when the odds were stacked against her.
She accepted.
Their partnership grew into something deeper.
Two families, one broken by poverty, the other by loss, became one.
My parents got married not long after, and soon after that, I was born.
But joy, it seemed, had a cruel expiry date.
A few months after my birth, my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
She fought for seven long years, quietly, gracefully, until the disease
claimed her.
My father never remarried. "No one could ever replace her," he once told me.
His voice thick with a pain that had long settled into his bones. "She made me believe in life again."
And that's the story I grew up with, the story of how two wounded hearts collided and stitched each other back together.
It's not just the story of how I came to be.
It's the reason I carry myself with a certain stillness, a reverence for pain, for love, and for second chances.
I am Henry Ukariwo, the son of Jane.