Stay with Me

Stay with Me Plot Summary

Introduction

Yejide receives an invitation that makes her hands tremble—her estranged husband Akin's father has died. After fifteen years of self-imposed exile in Jos, she must decide whether to return to Ilesa, the town where her marriage crumbled beneath the weight of secrets too heavy to bear. The funeral card arrives like a ghost from her past, summoning memories of the children she lost and the lies that destroyed everything she thought she knew about love. What began as a fairy-tale romance at university became a nightmare of deception, desperation, and unthinkable betrayal. Yejide believed she had married her soulmate, but Akin harbored a secret that would drive him to orchestrate the ultimate violation of their marriage vows. In a country where childlessness marks a woman as cursed, their struggle to conceive would tear apart not just their union, but the very fabric of what they believed about each other.

Chapter 1: The Weight of Emptiness: A Marriage Without Children

Yejide first saw Akin at a university film screening, his pink lower lip catching her eye in the dim glow of the projector. When their eyes met across the darkened auditorium, something fundamental shifted inside her—a recognition so profound it felt like destiny calling. Before the credits rolled, she knew her life had been cleaved into before and after this moment. Akin pursued her with the focused intensity of a man possessed. He drove two hours daily from his banking job in Ilesa just to spend evenings in her cramped university hostel room. While other suitors brought flowers and empty promises, Akin brought something rarer—the ability to listen as if her words contained eternal truths. When he proposed marriage before she finished her degree, citing the brevity of life after students died in a protest shooting, she said yes without hesitation. Their early years seemed blessed. Akin was promoted to bank manager while Yejide built a thriving hair salon, her skilled hands transforming women's appearances as efficiently as love had transformed her own life. They bought a house with multiple bedrooms, planning for the large family they both desperately wanted. But as months became years without conception, the empty rooms began to echo with unspoken fears. The pressure intensified when Akin's relatives started their campaign of concerned visits. His mother Moomi arrived monthly with a parade of potential second wives, each introduction masked as casual conversation but sharp as a blade against Yejide's pride. The message was clear—if she couldn't provide children, someone else would have to. Yejide endured hospital tests that revealed nothing wrong, visited miracle workers on distant mountains, and submitted to traditional ceremonies that left her dignity in tatters. Yet her womb remained obstinately empty, and with each passing month, she felt herself becoming less woman and more failure in her husband's eyes.

Chapter 2: Desperate Measures: When Deception Becomes the Only Path

The yellow-skinned woman arrived with Akin's relatives like a verdict delivered without trial. Funmi's beauty was undeniable, her smile calculated, her presence in Yejide's sitting room an invasion that would reshape everything. She knelt before Yejide as tradition demanded, calling her "senior wife" with honey-coated words that burned like acid. The family had chosen her as Akin's second wife, explaining patiently that one child calls another into the world, that Yejide's barrenness might be cured by sharing her husband. Yejide felt the world tilt off its axis as she processed this orchestrated ambush. Her stepmother Iya Martha watched with barely concealed satisfaction while Akin's uncle praised Funmi's youth and fertility. The plan had been made without consulting Yejide, her consent assumed rather than requested. She wanted to scream, to fight, to send this interloper back to whatever hole she'd crawled from. Instead, she found herself nodding, playing the role of the understanding first wife who welcomed her husband's new bride with open arms. What Yejide didn't know was that Akin had orchestrated everything from a position of desperate deception. Years of failed attempts at intimacy had revealed a truth too shameful to speak—he was impotent, incapable of the very act that creates children. The medical consultations, the pills, the procedures in Lagos hospitals had all proved useless. His marriage was built on a lie so fundamental that admitting it would destroy not just his relationship with Yejide, but his very identity as a man. Funmi moved into their home with her pink nightgowns and calculated seduction, but she couldn't solve a problem that existed beyond the realm of simple desire. Week after week, month after month, she remained as childless as Yejide, her presence serving only to heighten the tension in a household already stretched to breaking point. The empty bedrooms seemed to mock them all—three adults sharing a house but unable to create the one thing they all supposedly wanted.

Chapter 3: Born of Betrayal: Children Conceived Through Lies

The solution came through Akin's brother Dotun, a charming wastrel whose easy smile masked a talent for destruction. When Dotun lost his Lagos job and moved in with them, ostensibly temporary but stretching into months, he brought more than just his drinking problem and wandering hands. He brought the answer to Akin's impossible dilemma, though neither brother recognized it immediately. Akin's plan was born from desperation disguised as logic. If he couldn't father children himself, perhaps Dotun could do it for him. The arrangement would be clinical, limited, purposeful—a few weekends spread over several years to give Yejide the children she craved while preserving Akin's secret and their marriage. He convinced himself it was an act of love, a sacrifice made to save his wife from the shame of permanent barrenness. What Akin hadn't calculated was the human element that turns clinical arrangements into emotional disasters. When Dotun reluctantly agreed to the scheme, both brothers assumed they could control their hearts as easily as they controlled their schedules. But Yejide was not simply a vessel to be filled and emptied at their convenience. She was a woman starved of honesty, desperate for genuine connection, vulnerable to any man who treated her as more than a failed wife. The first child, Olamide, arrived like a miracle wrapped in soft yellow skin. The naming ceremony drew hundreds of guests who celebrated this vindication of Yejide's womanhood, this proof that faith could overcome any obstacle. But joy curdled quickly when Funmi was found dead at the bottom of their stairs the morning after the celebration, her neck broken, her pink nightgown pooled around her like spilled blood. The official verdict was accidental death, but questions lingered like smoke in the air. Had she discovered something about the real father of Yejide's child? Had someone ensured her silence permanently?

Chapter 4: The Cruelty of Loss: Death and Grief in a Fractured Family

Happiness proved as fragile as butterfly wings in the Ajayi household. Olamide lived only five months before sudden infant death syndrome claimed her while Yejide prepared a simple meal downstairs. The discovery of her still, silent daughter in the cot destroyed something fundamental in Yejide's faith in the world's basic fairness. She had endured years of humiliation and struggle to achieve motherhood, only to have it snatched away in minutes of ordinary domestic life. The funeral was a exercise in brutal tradition. Yejide and Akin were forbidden from attending the burial, forbidden from knowing where their daughter's tiny body was laid to rest. The mourners spoke in hushed tones about replacement children and God's mysterious ways, their calm acceptance of infant death more painful than open grief would have been. Yejide felt cheated not just of her child but of the right to mourn her properly, to scream and wail and tear her clothes as her heart demanded. When the second child Sesan arrived, he brought both hope and a new form of terror. The sickle-cell disease that coursed through his veins turned every minor illness into a potential death sentence. Yejide learned to read the signs of crisis like a meteorologist tracking storms—the subtle changes in breathing, the quality of his cries, the pallor that preceded collapsed veins and emergency hospital visits. She became a warrior mother, fighting a enemy that lived in her son's blood, gifted to him through her own genetics. But even warrior mothers can't hold back fate forever. Sesan lasted longer than his sister—six precious years of soccer games and storytelling, birthday parties shadowed by hospital stays and medication schedules. When the final crisis came, it was in a classroom at his beloved Catholic school, his teacher helpless as his small body surrendered to forces more powerful than love or prayer. This time Yejide's grief was not hushed but volcanic, her accusations against God and fate and the universe's cruel arithmetic echoing through hospital corridors.

Chapter 5: Unraveling Truths: The Cost of Secrets Exposed

The architecture of lies that held the Ajayi marriage together began crumbling when Dotun, drunk on palm wine and self-pity after Sesan's diagnosis, revealed secrets that were never his to tell. In a moment of misguided comfort, he spoke the truth that Akin had hidden for years—his brother's impotence, the medical consultations, the desperate arrangement that had produced their children. Yejide listened in growing horror as her entire marriage revealed itself as an elaborate deception. The confrontation, when it finally came, was almost anticlimactic after years of mounting suspicion. Akin sat in their living room, daughter Rotimi on his lap, and confirmed what Dotun had already revealed. His matter-of-fact admission—that he had orchestrated her seduction by his own brother—hit Yejide like physical blows. Every intimate moment, every whispered endearment, every promise of exclusive love had been contaminated by this fundamental dishonesty. What followed was inevitable as gravity. The afternoon Akin returned home early to find Yejide and Dotun in their marital bed was not an affair but an explosion—years of repressed rage and betrayal detonating in a single moment of violence. Akin's assault on his brother was methodical and savage, driven not by righteous anger but by the fury of a man whose own guilt had driven him beyond reason. When the lamp shattered against Dotun's skull, it took weeks to determine if the blow would prove fatal. The family tribunal that followed treated the violence as a financial dispute, both brothers collaborating in a fiction that preserved everyone's dignity while ignoring the festering wound at its heart. Dotun recovered and fled to Australia, carrying secrets that would poison him across oceans. Yejide moved into a separate bedroom, her silence more damaging than any accusation she might have leveled.

Chapter 6: Scattered Lives: Years of Separation and Silent Pain

The final act began with Rotimi's sickle-cell crisis in a Lagos hotel room while protesters burned tires in the streets outside. Nigeria itself was coming apart as the military government canceled the presidential election, and Akin found himself trapped between history and personal catastrophe, unable to reach a hospital as his daughter's fever spiked toward unconsciousness. When he finally carried her through the crowd of demonstrators, using her limp body like a white flag to prevent soldiers from firing, he believed he was racing death itself. The phone call to Bauchi reached Yejide in the middle of her friend's wedding preparations, luxury and celebration suddenly rendered meaningless by her husband's panicked voice. But instead of rushing home to stand vigil at another hospital bedside, something broke inside her with an almost audible crack. She had buried two children already, endured years of deception and betrayal, fought battles no woman should have to fight. The prospect of losing Rotimi too, of continuing the pretense of marriage with a man who had systematically destroyed her trust, became suddenly unbearable. Her decision to disappear was made in seconds but had been building for years. She told Akin she wasn't coming back, boarded a bus to Jos, and vanished into the chaos of a country whose own future had just been canceled. Behind her, she left a daughter she believed was dying and a husband she could no longer bear to see. The woman who had once fought mountain-top prophets for the right to bear children now walked away from the child she had carried for nine months. Akin spent the following days in a medical nightmare, carrying Rotimi between clinics as Lagos burned around them, administering fluids and fever reducers while expecting at any moment to lose his last connection to the woman he had loved and betrayed beyond forgiveness. When the crisis finally broke and Rotimi's fever subsided, he faced a choice that would define the rest of their lives. He could tell Yejide the truth—that their daughter had survived—or he could let her believe the worst and start over with only Rotimi for company.

Chapter 7: Reunion: Finding What Was Thought Forever Lost

Fifteen years passed like a held breath. Yejide built a new life in Jos, her successful jewelry business a testament to the resilience that had carried her through loss after loss. She trained herself not to think about the daughter she had abandoned, not to calculate what grade she would be in if she had lived, not to search young faces in crowds for features that might have been familiar. The pain had to be cauterized completely or it would consume everything she had managed to rebuild from the ashes of her former life. Akin raised Rotimi alone, or as alone as any man could be with his mother and sister providing guidance on the mysteries of raising a daughter. He told the girl—who insisted on being called Timi, refusing to carry a name that commemorated dead siblings—that her mother had left believing she was dead, that grief had driven Yejide into exile before the truth could reach her. It was a version of events that painted no one as entirely guilty or innocent, a story that preserved the possibility of redemption. The invitation to his father's funeral was Timi's idea, her final gesture before leaving for university studies abroad. She had insisted on tracing her mother through mutual friends, employing the detective work of social media and persistent questioning to locate Yejide's jewelry shop in Jos. But having found her, she lacked the courage to make contact directly. Only the neutral territory of a funeral, the imposed politeness of public grief, seemed safe enough for such a momentous reunion. When Yejide finally saw her daughter across the crowded funeral reception, the shock nearly dropped her to the ground. The young woman wearing yellow and green, laughing at something Akin had said, bore her face but carried herself with unfamiliar confidence. This was not the sick child she had abandoned but a healthy teenager who had survived everything genetics could throw at her. The realization that she had fled unnecessarily, that her daughter had lived and grown and thrived without her, brought a mixture of joy and regret too complex for any single emotion to contain.

Summary

In the airless classroom where three lives converged after decades of separation, Yejide finally heard the word she had never expected to hear again. When Timi whispered "Moomi"—my mother—fifteen years of carefully constructed defenses crumbled in an instant. The daughter who was supposed to be a memory lived and breathed and called her by the name she had never stopped longing to hear. The story that began with desperate love and impossible secrets found its resolution not in forgiveness or recrimination, but in the simple miracle of survival. Yejide's children had taken pieces of her with them into death, but Timi had returned something even more precious—the possibility that some bonds transcend even the most devastating betrayals. In a country built on the promise of transitions that never came, one small family discovered that the most important journeys are not about reaching destinations but about finding the courage to begin again.

About Author

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Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

Adébáyọ̀ investigates the intricate layers of human relationships, weaving themes of love, identity, and resilience into her narratives. Her literary work often reflects on how love acts as a transformative force within the bonds of family and the search for personal meaning. She extends these themes through her novels and short stories, which have appeared in prestigious publications like "The New York Times" and "The Guardian". In her debut novel, "Stay with Me," Adébáyọ̀ delves into marital relationships and infertility in a Nigerian context, illustrating how societal pressures shape intimate connections.\n\nHer writing is characterized by a sophisticated exploration of emotional complexities, as demonstrated in her second book, "A Spell of Good Things," which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Moreover, Adébáyọ̀'s works, including her play "Provenance," have garnered international acclaim, earning her numerous awards and residencies, such as the MacDowell Colony fellowship. Therefore, her contributions have significantly impacted readers who appreciate nuanced storytelling that challenges cultural and personal perceptions. \n\nBy providing a platform for diverse narratives, Adébáyọ̀'s literature resonates with audiences seeking stories of resilience and authenticity. Her bio reflects a commitment to elevating African voices in global literature, making her an influential figure for both emerging writers and readers worldwide. As a four-time AALBC.com Bestselling Author, Adébáyọ̀'s work continues to inspire discussions on the complexities of human relationships, making her a pivotal voice in contemporary literature.

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