Inherited Scars.

Rising from the Ashes Chapter 5

Ntalami woke to the soft chime of her phone buzzing against the nightstand. For once, it wasn’t Duke’s name on the screen, pulling her into the same spiral she had fought for years. Instead, it was a message from her friend Aisha.

“Congratulations, love! They featured your crochet bags on the Nairobi Creatives page! Over 10,000 followers!”

Ntalami blinked at the message, then unlocked her phone to check. Sure enough, her photo—smiling in a sunflower-yellow shawl she had made herself—was pinned at the top of the page. The caption read: ‘Meet Ntalami, the young woman weaving healing into every stitch.’

Her breath caught in her chest. This wasn’t just about art. It was about being seen—truly seen—for something beyond her pain.

She closed her eyes and whispered to herself, “I’m becoming someone new.”

Duke, meanwhile, stared at the ceiling of his apartment, the morning sun slicing through the blinds like knives. His head throbbed from last night’s drinking, and the ashtray on the table overflowed with cigarette butts. Chloe’s perfume still lingered faintly on the pillows, though she had left weeks ago.

He reached for his phone. No messages. Not from Chloe. Not from Ntalami. Not even from his friends, who had grown tired of babysitting his self-destruction.

For years, Duke had been the man with a presence—charming at clubs, confident in the gym, loud with his jokes. Now, stripped of Ntalami’s forgiving love and Chloe’s flirtatious comfort, he felt like a shell.

His mind drifted, unwillingly, to his mother. The day she walked out, her perfume sharp in the air as she carried her suitcase past him. He remembered clinging to her leg, begging her to stay, his small fingers slipping from her dress as she told him to “be strong for your sister.”

She never came back.

That wound, buried deep, now oozed in his silence. Every woman he had ever touched was an echo of that departure—something to hold until they inevitably left.

Duke clenched his jaw and pushed the thought away, but it refused to leave him.

Ntalami’s days began to stretch wide with possibility. She poured her energy into her crochet brand, posting reels of her work, engaging with her growing community, and even teaching beginner classes online.

One evening, she received an email invitation: “We would love for you to showcase your designs at the Nairobi Handmade Fashion Expo.”

Her heart skipped. A year ago, she had been begging Duke to see her, to validate her existence with scraps of affection. Now, she was being invited to step into the light on her own.

When she told Aisha, her friend squealed over the phone. “Girl, do you realize what this means? You’re not just surviving—you’re thriving.”

Ntalami smiled, though tears prickled her eyes. Thriving. It felt foreign, but she was beginning to believe it.

She bought a simple but elegant dress for the expo, something flowy and pastel, that made her feel like the woman she was becoming—soft yet strong, rooted yet blooming.

On the day of the event, she stood backstage, her creations displayed on mannequins. Bags with sunflower motifs, shawls dyed in ocean hues, scarves that seemed to hold whispers of warmth. Each piece carried a fragment of her story, stitched in resilience.

As the crowd wandered through the exhibition hall, murmuring admiration, Ntalami felt a quiet pride swell in her chest.

For the first time, she wasn’t defined by scars unseen. She was defined by what she had created from them.

Duke was losing grip.

His work at the press company had started to suffer. Deadlines slipped past him, his cartoons grew sloppy, and his boss had pulled him aside more than once. “Duke, you’re talented. But if you keep this up, we can’t keep you.”

Still, he couldn’t summon the focus. His nights bled into mornings at the bottom of bottles, his laughter at bars more hollow each time.

One evening, he stumbled home after a fight with a stranger at the club. His lip was split, his shirt torn. As he looked at himself in the mirror, he barely recognized the man staring back. His dreadlocks, once his pride, hung unkempt. His abs, once carved from discipline, had softened. His eyes—bloodshot, empty—spoke louder than words.

For a flicker of a moment, he thought of calling Ntalami. She had always patched him up, always reminded him he was more than his chaos. But the thought quickly soured. She wasn’t coming back.

He smashed the glass against the sink. Blood pooled along his knuckles, but he didn’t flinch. The pain felt almost like relief.

Ntalami’s healing wasn’t linear. Some nights, loneliness crept in, whispering Duke’s name. But she had tools now: her journal, her therapy sessions, her community. She learned to sit with the ache without letting it consume her.

One evening, while journaling, she wrote: “I chased his love because it mirrored what I knew as a child—instability, shouting, the storm before the silence. But love doesn’t need storms. Love can be steady. I choose steady.”

Writing those words felt like closing a door she had kept ajar for too long.

That weekend, at the expo, she met a man named Leo—a soft-spoken photographer with kind eyes and an easy laugh. He admired her work, asking thoughtful questions about her process. Unlike Duke, he didn’t dominate the conversation. He listened.

Ntalami felt a spark, subtle but present. She wasn’t ready for romance, not fully. But she realized something important: she could be desired and respected at the same time.

It was enough to know healthier love existed in the world, even if she wasn’t ready to step into it yet.

Duke’s breaking point came on a Sunday evening. He had been drinking since morning, the apartment littered with empty bottles. His father called, asking why he hadn’t visited his sister in weeks. Duke snapped, shouting into the phone, “You don’t know what I’ve been through! You don’t know what it’s like to be left!”

His father was silent for a long moment before replying quietly, “I do know. She left me too.”

The line went dead, but the words rang in Duke’s ears like a bell he couldn’t unhear.

That night, for the first time in years, Duke let himself cry. Not the angry tears he had shed in fights, not the manipulative ones he had used to win Ntalami back. But raw, guttural sobs that came from the boy who had watched his mother walk away.

It was ugly and unsteady, but it was real.

He curled on the floor, clutching his stomach, as though trying to hold himself together. For once, he didn’t reach for the bottle.

Ntalami, under the same sky that night, sat on her balcony with her crochet hook in hand. The moonlight painted her face as she worked on a new shawl, this one in shades of lavender and cream.

She wasn’t thinking of Duke. She was thinking of herself—the woman who had survived, who had learned, who was slowly stitching herself whole.

As the stitches grew, so did her certainty: she was never going back.

The road ahead was hers alone, and for the first time, that didn’t scare her. It thrilled her.