All Chapters of SELINE'S FANTASY: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The flight had landed past midnight, and by the time Sweet’s driver pulled through the gates, the whole house was dark except for the porch light nobody had remembered to switch off. Seline had insisted on seeing him in, Marcus’s half-joking text still glowing on her phone, something about Sweet not being trusted to “go straight to bed and not straight to a club”, and somewhere between waiting for his housekeeper to confirm the security code and sinking into the couch to “just rest her eyes for five minutes,” sleep had simply taken her.She didn’t remember him coming back downstairs. She didn’t remember him settling onto the other end of the same couch, phone slipping from his hand, exhaustion finally catching up with a man who had spent four days smiling for cameras on no real sleep. All she knew, when the world came back to her, was an alarm shrieking somewhere close by and a hand, warm, heavy, entirely too comfortable, landing on her waist.“PERVERT!”Her own scream could have woken

“It’s about your mum,” King said again when Seline didn’t answer fast enough, “and Madam Christiana.”She stood very still on the gravel path outside Sweet’s gate, phone pressed so hard to her ear it left a mark. “King, I don’t have the mind for riddles this morning. Just say it.”He exhaled, and for a man who usually filled every silence with something charming, the pause stretched long enough to worry her. “Can we meet? This isn’t a phone conversation.”“King.”“Fine. Fine .... you know my mother has been ‘helping’ your family since your dad passed. The small loans. The school fees she paid quietly two Christmases ago. You know that, abi?”“I know,” Seline said slowly. Her mother had never said the word loan out loud, not once, but Seline had done the arithmetic herself a long time ago; the rent that never seemed to be a p

It was almost dark by the time Seline made it back to Sweet’s house, the day having drained itself of every ounce of certainty she’d started it with. She found him alone in the kitchen where they’d had breakfast that morning, the ruined eggs long since cleared away, a single lamp on over the counter throwing soft yellow light across a stack of papers he was pretending to read.He looked up when she came in, and whatever he saw in her face made him set the papers down immediately.“Where have you been? I called you eleven times.”“I was with my mother.”Something in his posture eased, relief plain on his face. “Okay. Good. I was worried after this morning—”“Is your father around?” she cut in. “No .... forget it, that’s not really the question I need answered first.”He frowned, half-rising from his stool. “Seline, you’re scaring me a little.

Seline didn't call ahead. She simply went, catching the last commercial bus back across town, King's warning and Madam Christiana's words looping over and over in her head until they blurred into a single, insistent question she needed answered before she could sleep at all that night.Sweet opened the door before she'd finished knocking, like he'd been standing just behind it, waiting."You came back," he said, something between relief and surprise in his voice."I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually think before you answer, not just say whatever gets us past the question fastest."

The house in Ikoyi was smaller than Seline expected; a modest bungalow tucked behind an overgrown hedge, nothing like the grand, gated compound Sweet had grown up in. Weeds pushed up through cracks in the driveway, and the paint on the shutters had faded to a soft, forgotten blue. It didn't look like it belonged to the same family at all."Nobody's lived here since Aunty Rachael," Sweet said quietly, parking the car outside the gate. "My mother kept it. Never sold it, never rented it out. I always assumed it was sentimental. I never really asked."His mother was already waiting on the small veranda when they walked up, a cardboard box resting on the plastic table beside her, its edges soft and yellowed with age. She looked smaller than Seli