She took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

“Nonso went to the cemetery. He found your son’s grave. He wants to see you. Not to apologize, but to atone for his sins.”

I agreed. We met in the cemetery, under the same mango tree where I buried Chidera.

Nonso arrived silently, his shoulders slumped.

“Lucía…”

“Don’t say anything.”

He knelt beside the grave and sobbed like a child.

—Forgive me, son. You were never a mistake.

We planted a small tree next to the gravestone.

“What would you have liked Chidera to have been?” he asked me, his voice breaking.

“A good man. Like the one you can still be.”

From that day on, Nonso changed. He funds a school for girls expelled for teenage pregnancy. He called it “Chidera’s House.”

“No girl should go through what you went through,” he told me when he invited me to visit the school.