The silence after Adams's betrayal in the atrium wasn't just an absence of sound; it was a new, suffocating reality. Mina moved through the Dared mansion like a ghost haunting someone else's life. The opulent rugs swallowed her footsteps, the high ceilings seemed to diminish her, and the cold, beautiful artwork on the walls stared straight through her.
She was utterly alone.
Adams's choice—that slight, devastating break of eye contact—had been a door slamming shut. He now spent even more time sequestered with his father in the study, a willing prisoner in the gilded cage of his own failure, avoiding the messiness of the wife he no longer knew how to protect.
Hajiya Zainab's victory was absolute, and she wore it not with gloating, but with a chilling, polite finality. Mina's existence was now politely, systematically, erased.
It started at breakfast. Mina entered the dining room to find the table set for three. Her usual place, beside Adams, was conspicuously bare. No plate, no cutlery, no glass.
Hajiya Zainab looked up from her papaya, her expression one of mild surprise. "Oh, Mina. Good morning. Rakiya assumed you would be taking breakfast in your room with the baby. It's so much more practical, don't you think? No need for you to trouble yourself with formalities."
It was a masterstroke. Delivered with feigned consideration, it was an exile. Mina was no longer a member of the family at mealtimes; she was a nuisance to be managed.
"I… yes. Of course," Mina whispered, her cheeks burning. She retreated, the sound of Alhaji Ibrahim's low murmur and the gentle clink of their china feeling like a celebration from which she'd been barred.
Later, she went to the lavish indoor playroom—a space filled with expensive, untouched educational toys—to give Trisha a change of scenery. She hadn't been there five minutes before Aisha appeared with her two impeccably dressed sons.
"Oh, Mama said you might be in here," Aisha said, her smile not quite meeting her eyes. She subtly redirected her sons to the other side of the room. "She just wanted me to remind you that the boys have their piano lesson in here at eleven. The tutor is very strict about distractions. Perhaps the atrium would be better?"
The message was clear: even the spaces meant for children weren't hers to inhabit. She was a disruption, an inconvenience to be scheduled around.
The isolation was a physical ache. She tried to call Lara, but the connection in her wing of the house was mysteriously poor, the calls dropping after a few seconds. When she mentioned it to Adams, he just shrugged, lost in his own fog of misery. "It's an old house, Mina. Dead spots."
She didn't believe him. She suspected the Wi-Fi password had been changed, another tether to the outside world neatly severed.
The final, crushing blow came from an unexpected source: Trisha. Her daughter, her one constant, began to change. Hajiya Zainab had quietly taken over her care, employing a stern, efficient nanny who spoke to Trisha only in Hausa and followed a strict regimen of "developmental" activities. When Mina tried to rock Trisha to sleep with a soft English lullaby one night, her daughter fussed, pushing her away.
"Bar shi," the nanny said gently but firmly, taking Trisha from her arms. "Ta saba da hanyata. She is used to her way now."
Mina stood in the doorway of the nursery, watching as the nanny laid Trisha down in the crib without a song, without a cuddle. Her child was being gentled into a different world, a Dared world, and she was being pushed to the periphery. She was losing her daughter not to tragedy, but to the slow, insidious poison of someone else's "better way."
One afternoon, drowning in the silence of her room, she did the only thing she could think to do. She went to find Adams. She found him not in the study, but in the library, staring blankly at a shelf of leather-bound books he would never read.
"Adams," she said, her voice echoing in the vast, book-lined room. "We need to leave."
He turned, his eyes dull. "Leave? And go where, Mina? To a park bench?"
"Anywhere," she pleaded, her desperation giving her strength. "A small apartment. A single room. I'll get a teaching job. We'll manage. This… this is killing us. Can't you see that? This isn't living. This is a slow death."
For a fleeting second, she saw a spark in his eyes—a memory of the man who built empires from nothing. A flicker of hope.
And then it died. He shook his head, a slow, weary motion. "And do what? Live on your salary? Let my wife support me while I sit in a rented room and stare at the walls? You think that would be better than this? That would be a different kind of death, Mina. A more humiliating one."
"At least it would be our death!" she cried, her composure breaking. "Not one orchestrated by your mother! At least we would be together!"
"We are together," he said, his voice hollow, gesturing to the opulent room around them. "We have a roof. We have food. Our daughter is safe and cared for. That is what together looks like right now. That is all I can give you."
The finality in his tone was an ice bath. He had accepted their gilded captivity. He had traded their marriage for security, their partnership for three meals a day and a nanny for his child.
He had given up.
Mina looked at her husband, truly looked at him. The fire, the ambition, the fierce intelligence—it was all gone, extinguished. In its place was a hollowed-out shell, a man so broken by failure that he would rather be his mother's prisoner than his wife's partner.
She didn't argue. She didn't plead. The fight drained out of her, leaving a cold, terrifying clarity.
She turned and walked away, her footsteps silent on the Persian rug.
That night, she lay in the massive bed, a full foot of cold, empty space between her and Adams's sleeping form. The isolation was complete. She had lost her husband to his shame, her daughter to her grandmother's influence, and her home to the flood. She was a ghost in a palace, a wife in a marriage of one.
As she stared at the ornate ceiling, a single, revolutionary thought crystallized in the darkness.
If she was already alone, then she was also free.
Free to stop trying to win a war she couldn't win. Free to stop begging for loyalty from a man who had none left to give.