"Cut!"

The smile on Kemi's face does not drop, even after a beat and another, but becomes more demure as the crew sigh collectively and begin to pack up for the day.

"You did well today, Kemi." The director, Mirabel, states, helping Kemi out of her heavy coat. They just finished shooting a scene where the main character was proposed to in the snow.

"Thank you. It was a pleasure." Kemi's voice is almost a whisper.

"How is Adaobi?" Mirabel asks, pronouncing the name as two.

"She's okay. She wanted to come with me today but she has a test tomorrow so I had her study."

Adaobi is Kemi's seven year-old daughter and the only reason she smiles before the cameras when all she wants to do is curl up and cry. Doing life shouldn't be this hard.

"You should really bring her along next time. Maybe she and Rose could play together."

"Yeah, maybe."

Adaobi would not come to play with Rose. She would not come even if she could– she never really enjoyed the company of her peers.

Kemi still smiles with her colleagues as they board the bus and head back to their neighbourhood. Life is good to everyone.

When Kemi returns to the one-room apartment she and Adaobi moved into after the news was sprung on them, it is quiet.

The news had come on the eve of her usual row with Nonso, her lover since secondary school and the man who had brought her to the UK only to find all the things he despised about her.

The cause of their latest fight was her mood swings – menopausal, of course, but a right inconvenience to her fifty year-old husband who never really grew a day older than thirty mentally.

When the news came, she was making his favourite soup in the kitchen and listening to Dido. The soup was supposed to be an apology– onugbu that was bitter enough to deter even the unrepentant meat lover, Adaobi, from snagging one meat, coupled with proper pounded yam, all condiments directly from the homeland. It was supposed to pacify him until the next time she complained of heat while he was fiddling with the thermostat because he could not stand cold.

The sound of her heels on the floor is gunshots to her ears and for a fleeting moment, she wonders if they should have remained at Nonso's well-carpeted home. Everything is as it should be– the humidifier letting its presence known every odd minute with the squeak of her neighbour's bed and accompanying moans– she had told Adaobi the woman just liked playing on her bed. It was pathetic really, and Nonso would have handled it better, but he was not here.

No, they both read the letter from Adaobi's doctor, asking for immediate response because they had noticed something strange in her last scan, persistent headaches was the complaint. They wanted to conduct tests for an informed diagnosis.

Nonso dropped them off at the hospital and picked them up afterwards, Kemi holding back tears because she did not want Adaobi to be scared. It was a malignant tumor and it was growing fast. They saw the image– one blob spreading itself through brain mater.

There were two options; try chemotherapy – last ditch effort with low prognosis, or let the sickness run its course and save money.

This kitchen was unlike the kitchen in their former home with its chandelier and island. This kitchen was a designated space where you couldn't even pound yam without half of your body entering the living room. The hum of the refrigerator was normal.

So was that of the generator in the salon nect door.

When she enters her daughter's room and sees Adaobi bent over her book, her angelic face stretching into a smile at her arrival, her smile widens then. Not into the flattered disbelieving one as her colleague knelt before her on set, fashioned to sell hope to strangers watching from behind a screen.

It isn't the smile of a woman trying to keep it together and figure her next move, no.

It isn't the smile she had on her face when the doctor, bemused and chastised, had apologised for the mix-up. It was a name thing, Kemi suspected a colour thing as well, but her Adaobi was not dying so who cared that a man couldn't tell the difference between two black families.

She did not fight with Nonso when they came home with the good news. She had walked straight into Adaobi's room and packed everything. Nonso was a man of many words, but faced with the gravity of his actions in the hectic days leading to their big relief, the thread stitching his lips shut were of the durable kind.

Kemi holds her daughter close to her chest as her smile morphs into something solid in her bones. She finally recognises the silence for what it truly is– uncertainty. She embraces it either way.

A mother would protect her child no matter the cost. Even if it was completely cutting off a man who had picked the second option.