Novels by Priscilla Osei

A Name That Doesn’t FitThe Lockhart house woke at five-thirty. Wren knew because she was awake for it, lying in a bed the size of a small boat, listening to the pipes tick and the first footsteps cross the hall below. At the diner she had always been up before the sun. Sleeping in felt like being a fraud twice over.On the first morning she walked into the kitchen in a silk robe and found the cook, a broad, quiet man named Mr. Bellamy, arranging eggs on a tray. Three maids stopped what they were doing. Wren took in the long table, the cold coffee at the end of it, and did what she had done every morning for six years: she picked up the pot, poured a cup, and carried it over to Mr. Bellamy’s elbow.“Ma’am,” he said slowly, “the staff takes their coffee in the pantry.”“I know,” said Wren. “I just thought you looked like you needed it.”Silence. Then one of the maids, a young woman with freckles, hid a smile in her sleeve. By the end of the week Wren knew all their names. Mrs. Okafor,

The BargainThe ceremony passed in fragments. A hymn Wren didn’t know. A ring slid onto her finger with a precision that felt like a signature. The officiant’s voice saying husband and wife in a church full of people who had come to witness a merger. When Adrian bent to kiss her, it was brief and cool, a sealed document of a kiss, and Wren stood very still and thought, absurdly, of the diner’s coffee machine and the way it hissed when it was done.The reception was worse. She smiled until her jaw ached. She answered to “Seraphina” eleven times, and each time the name felt like a stranger’s coat. Adrian stayed beside her through all of it, one hand light at the small of her back, saying almost nothing. Whenever a guest asked too many questions, he answered them first, smoothly, in a voice that closed the subject like a door.Neither of them spoke in the car afterward. The city slid past in streaks of gold and glass, and Wren watched her reflection in the window, a bride in a borrowed f

The GroomOn the morning of the wedding, Wren woke before the alarm and lay still, listening to the house.Three women worked around her for two hours: one on her hair, one on her face, one on the dress, ivory silk with a hundred small buttons down the back. When they were done and the door had closed behind them, Wren stood in front of the tall mirror and did not recognize anyone. The woman looking back was Sera: the chin, the shoulders, the faint bored curve of the mouth. Only the eyes were wrong. They were too awake.“Not bad,” said a voice from the doorway. Sera leaned against the frame in her robe, arms folded. For once she wasn’t smiling. “Stand like that and nobody will look twice.” She hesitated. “The Lockhart men are all the same, you know. Cold. He’ll ignore you. That’s the one mercy of it.”“Who is he?”“Julian. A second cousin, I think. Nobody important.” Sera shrugged, but her eyes slid away. “Just don’t fall for him. People like us don’t get to.”She was gone before Wren

TermsMargaret told her the rest that night, alone, in a sitting room with a fire that gave no warmth.“I should be honest with you,” she said, in the voice of someone who had decided honesty was now useful. “When you were born, I almost died. The doctors said I would never recover fully. I was not a gentle woman afterward. I looked at you, the second twin, the one who had cost me so much, and I told them to take you away.”Wren held very still.“Ruth, my nanny, could not do it. She hid you, and she placed you with her mother-in-law. I learned this later and decided it was kinder not to interfere.” Margaret paused. “I am not asking you to forgive me. I am asking you to understand that the family needs this marriage. Charles’s company will not survive the year without the Lockhart merger. Sera will not do it. You will.”“I said no.”“Yes.” Margaret smiled thinly. “And Charles has a very good relationship with the hospital’s administrators. It would be so easy for your grandmother’s tre

The Girl With Her Face The car that came for her was the black sedan. Wren recognized it the moment the driver opened the door, and she got in anyway, because there was a small duffel bag on her lap, an unpaid bill in her chest, and nothing left to protect but a woman asleep in a hospital bed. For the first hour nobody spoke. The driver kept his eyes on the road, and Margaret and Charles had taken a second car, so that Wren sat alone in the back with the smell of leather and the sense of being delivered. She watched the town thin out into fields, then highway, then strip malls and glass buildings she had only seen on television. At a red light she pulled out her phone and typed a message to the nurses’ station: Please tell Edna I’ll visit Sunday. Please tell her I love her. Her thumb hovered over the send button for a long time before she pressed it, because it felt like a goodbye. The drive took two hours and ended somewhere the roads were wider and the lawns looked combed. Iron g

The VisitorsThe doctor’s voice was careful, the way people’s voices got when the news was bad and expensive.“Mrs. Calloway needs the procedure within two weeks. After that, the window narrows.” He glanced at the chart in his hands. “Her insurance covers a fraction. I’m sorry. I wish I had better news.”Wren thanked him because someone, her grandmother, had taught her to say thank you even when the world was ending. Then she walked out into the hospital corridor and stood against the wall until her legs agreed to hold her. Through the narrow window of the door beside her she could see Edna asleep, small and gray against the white pillow, an IV taped to the back of a hand that had once kneaded bread for the whole church.“Excuse me.”The woman who had spoken wore a camel coat that probably cost more than Wren’s rent. She was in her fifties, silver-blonde, with a face arranged very carefully into something like emotion. Beside her stood a tall man in a charcoal suit, watching Wren the