There’s a way silence screams when you’ve lived in a house where the walls know more bruises than laughter.

Sewa knows it well.

She wears it like a perfume, faint but lingering. The scent of rooms that once held her mother**'s** tears in bowls under leaking roofs. The sound of a slap and screams afterwards were once her alarm clock. Now it’s only a memory. Only. As if memories can’t also break bones.

At twenty-three now, she lives in a small self-contain in Yaba with two windows, one boyfriend, and a trauma she keeps sweeping under the rug like her mother did broken glass.

Her boyfriend, Tobe, is nothing like her father. Not in the way he speaks or the way he looks at her. Not in the way he moves around her body like he’s scared of cracking china. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t throw phones. He doesn’t punch walls. Still**,** when his voice climbs, even slightly, her heartbeat changes gear and she recoils.

Tonight, they argued. About something silly. Maybe leftover suya or a forgotten text. She can’t even remember now. All she knows is that his voice rose, and without hesitating, she took a step back, then another, then another, until her back met the wall, and she folded her arms around herself again.

He noticed. He always does.

"Sewa," he called, his voice low and soft now. "Just because I’m mad at you doesn’t mean I want to see you cry or flinch."

Her breath caught and her knees wobbled.

It wasn’t just what he said, but how he said it. Like his words reached for her rather than through her.

So she looked at him. A tear dropped from her left eye and she remembered how her mother screamed so loud the landlord threatened to evict them. She remembered how her father’s rage made her throw herself between fists and fury. She remembered the scar on her wrist, the dried blood on bathroom tiles, and the baby her mother lost.

"Do you know," she whispered, "that my mother once broke her leg trying to run from a man who said he loved her?"

Tobe didn’t speak. He didn’t pray or advise her. He just wiped the tear off her face and opened his arms.

And for the first time in years, she walked into a hug and didn’t brace for impact.