Goodbye,
Original story on Patreon.
I watched him, my pulse a war drum in my chest.
For years—years—I had rehearsed this moment in the shower, in traffic, in the hollow hours before dawn. The words had calcified inside me, sharp and ready. Today, they would cut.
He stood in my empty sitting room like a man surveying ruins he’d caused but wouldn’t claim. His eyes swept the bare walls, the single chair, the absence of everything soft. He was calculating, always calculating—wondering where I slept, how I ate, whether I’d broken yet.
I watched him bring chicken. Peace offering or pity meal, I couldn’t tell. Didn’t matter. I ate it anyway, every bone-clean bite, because rage burns calories and I’d been burning for months.
On a full stomach, I let the truth loose.
“You were always good at business,” I said, my voice steady as a metronome. “No emotions. Clean cuts. That’s what made you successful.”
He nodded, not understanding yet that this was the overture, not the praise.
“Your Yvis due.”
The word landed like a stone in still water. Ripples. Silence.
“You refused to write me a recommendation letter. Fine. Professional discretion, you called it. But then you took my work—my strategies, my campaigns, my late nights bleeding creativity onto whiteboards—and you signed your name to them. You built a monument to yourself on the foundation of my bones.”
His face twitched. Almost imperceptible. But I saw it.
“You spread lies about how I made money. Whispers in boardrooms, poison in inboxes. You made me a ghost in the very company we built, brick by brick, dream by dream. You erased me like a pencil sketch you decided wasn’t good enough for the final draft.”
I thought of Steve then. Steve with his lawyer’s mind, sharp as broken glass, who could untangle the knotted mess of Abuja politics and E.’s shadowy involvement with the precision of a surgeon. I loved him for that clarity, that refusal to flinch from complexity.
When things got dangerous—when the threats went from abstract to concrete, when kidnapping stopped being paranoia and started being strategy—Steve suggested Tsavo Lifestyles. Remote. Untraceable. A place where the underground could swallow you whole if you needed it to.
Then Vic showed up at my door with his friend and an offer: half the company. Fifty percent of everything we’d bled for.
It should have been a dream.
It felt like a cage.
“I didn’t want your half,” I told him now, my voice rising like a crescendo.
“I wanted to go home.”
Uganda.
The word tasted like childhood, like my mother’s hands, like the sister I’d never met. My parents’ divorce had carved a chasm through my life, and I’d spent years filling it with the noise of the big city—deals and deadlines and the electric hum of ambition.
But the pandemic cracked something open. When the world stopped, I couldn’t run anymore.
Seven years. I hadn’t seen my mother in seven years. Hadn’t heard her voice except in memory, filtered through static and shame. Word reached me that I had a little sister now. A stranger who carried half my blood- Sanyu. Translates to our blessings.
One month wouldn’t fix it. So I took more. I went home when Corona loosened its grip, and I stayed until the ground beneath me felt solid again.
“When I came back,” I said, and my voice cracked—not from weakness, but from the sheer pressure of holding it in for so long, “you’d erased me.”
Every file. Every mention. Every shred of evidence that I’d existed in that company’s story. You can scrub a hard drive, but you can’t scrub a partnership.
Or so I thought.
“You told yourself it was necessary,” I continued. “That my presence was ‘unhealthy’ for your new chapter. That people move on, entities evolve. You convinced yourself you were being professional.”
I took it with a big spoon.
I laughed then, bitter and bright. “But you weren’t. You were being afraid. Afraid that if people knew how much of your success was mine, they’d look at you differently. Afraid that your empire had cracks in the foundation with my name on them.”
Now he stood here, in my stripped-down sanctuary, looking for more.
Not to apologize—though he muttered something that sounded like sorry, hollow and reflexive as a cough. No, he came to mine some Yvi. To extract whatever Yvi ideas still glimmered in my mind, to read the writings on my wall like a tomb robber deciphering hieroglyphs.
He couldn’t help himself. His eyes kept drifting to my sketches, my fragments of thought pinned like butterflies to the plaster. He was here to take again.
But I’ve learned. I’ve learned to keep my mind private, my creations wrapped in thorns and smoke. I’ve learned to build gardens with gates that don’t open for scavengers.
I’ve learned that some nightmares fade if you stop feeding them your fear.
“You have ADHD,” I said quietly, and he flinched.
“You’re at war with your own mind. With your conscience. That’s why you can’t sit still. Why you keep coming back here, like a moth to a flame you can’t remember lighting.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
“I prayed for this moment for years, Vic. Prayed for the chance to stand in front of you and name what you did. Not for an audience. Not for revenge. Just… to say it. To make the invisible visible.”
God gave me that today. The stage, the silence, the courage.
And now that I’ve said it, I realize: it doesn’t matter anymore.
“You stole my career,” I told him. “You rendered me ghost-like. But ghosts can haunt, Vic. And I’m not haunting you. I’m leaving you.”
I’m getting better at what I do. Sharper. Clearer. His memory is fading like bad music, a song I used to know all the words to but can’t quite recall anymore.
No one asks me about the company now. But his private clients? They’re still texting. Still reaching out. Still remembering who actually did the work.
I’ve said my goodbyes. I’m smitten with something else now—a genie in my clouds, a project that’s mine and mine alone, untouchable by men who mistake collaboration for conquest.
He turned to leave.
I let him.
The door closed.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty.
It was full.
Full of everything I’d carried and finally set down. Full of the rhythm of my own breath, my own heartbeat, my own unwritten future.
I slept well that night. I sleep better at night.
For the first time in years, I slept like the living.
Vic.