Novels by Agatha Ikpasa

Roza pov I did not answer him right away. “Who were you running from, Roza?” The words sat between us in the cold bookshop air, and I felt my own pulse in my throat. Douglas had gone quiet behind the counter, pretending to sort receipts he had already sorted twice. The woman who had walked in asking about atlases was still standing near the door, unaware she had interrupted something that mattered. “I was not running from anyone,” I said. “I was just leaving somewhere that stopped being good for me.” Soren studied me the way he studied the strange old books Douglas kept in the back, like he was trying to work out what edition I was, what was worth underneath the cover. “That is not really an answer,” he said. “It is the one I have.” He nodded slowly. He did not push, and I felt the space where the questions should have kept coming, and something in me both relaxed and ached at the same time. I wanted him to ask again. I hated that I wanted that. “Fair enough,” he sai

POV: RozaEdinburgh did not feel like running away. It felt like breathing for the first time in years. The cold here was sharper than London, but it felt honest. My new room was small. The boiler knocked at night. A bakery below opened at half past five and filled the street with the smell of bread before sunrise. A tabby cat sat on the windowsill across the street every morning, watching the world like it had nowhere else to be.I did not miss my old life, Not for one second.I was ten weeks pregnant. My body was already changing in small, secret ways. Tiredness hit me in waves. Certain smells turned my stomach without warning. And under all of it sat something I had not let myself feel in years. Hope. Small and careful, the kind you protect with both hands.I found a bookshop by accident, looking for somewhere warm to sit. It sat between a dry cleaner and a chip shop, easy to walk past if you were not looking. The owner was an old man named Douglas. He wore the same burgundy jumper

POV: RozaI gave myself two days.Two days to move through the house carefully, taking only what was mine, the clothes, the books with my name written in the front covers, the small framed photograph of my parents that had lived on the guest room shelf because Callum had not wanted it anywhere more visible. Two days to do it quietly and thoroughly and without leaving a single thing behind that I would one day need to come back for.I should have been faster.Gemma arrived on the second morning with a key.I heard the front door before I heard her. The specific sound of someone entering a house they consider theirs, no knock, no pause, just the turn of a lock and the swing of a door. I came out of the bedroom and looked down the stairs and she was in the hallway below, unwinding a cashmere scarf from her neck and hanging it on the hook where my coat had lived for seven years. She looked up when she heard me."Morning," she said. "Callum said you were still sorting your things. Take you

POV: RozaI did not sleep.I sat on the floor of the guest bathroom with my knees pulled up and the pregnancy test in my lap and I watched the night move through the frosted window, black to dark blue to the flat, exhausted grey of a London morning that did not care what had happened in this house. The boiler clicked. A fox barked somewhere on the street below. The house was quiet in the specific way it always was when Callum was in it, every sound careful, every silence loaded.At some point I heard his footsteps on the landing. Then the master bedroom door closing. Then nothing.I thought about my mother.She had married a man who did not love her when she was twenty-two and spent the next thirty years being grateful he stayed. She used to say, "You earn your place, Rosalind. A woman always has to earn her place." She had said it like wisdom. Like something she was giving me. I had believed her so completely that I had spent seven years in a house that was not mine, in a marriage th

POV: RozaI knew her perfume before anything else.Chanel No. 5. Gemma had worn it since we were twenty-one, since she had saved for two months to buy the first bottle and spritzed it on her wrists in the university toilets before a night out, grinning at me in the mirror. I had borrowed it once. She had pretended to be annoyed. That was twelve years ago and I could still smell it in my sleep.She was on the study sofa. Callum was beside her. They did not pull apart when the door opened.The room sorted itself into details the way a room does when you are in shock, when the mind refuses the whole picture and starts collecting pieces instead. The lamp on the desk throwing warm light. Callum's jacket folded over the back of the chair. Gemma's heels on the floor beside the sofa, placed neatly, side by side. Her hair loose. His shirt untucked. The two of them looking at me across the room with completely different expressions, Callum with the flat, unsurprised look of a man who had been c

POV: Roza"You burned it again."That was the first thing Callum ever said to me in the kitchen. Three months into our marriage, a Sunday morning, eggs on the stove, his mother's recipe that I had written out by hand and practiced twice. He said it without looking up from his phone. He poured his coffee, picked up his briefcase, and walked back out, and I stood there with the smoke curling around me and that single sentence sitting in my chest like a stone I did not yet know I would carry for seven years.I should have understood him then. I should have read that moment for exactly what it was. But I was twenty-three and newly married and desperately in love with a man who looked at me like a problem he had agreed to manage, and I told myself it would get better. That he would soften. That somewhere beneath the grey eyes and the expensive suits and the silences that filled our house like weather, there was a man who would one day choose me.Seven years. That was how long it took me to