KASERA

LEAVING HOME

5
Eko-Djan Country House.

Neo stood at the balcony over looking the outdoor pool of their country house. It was Sunday and the sun was gradually setting on the third day of their stay in Koforidua but Sara was still not with them.

On Saturday, when she was supposed to arrive, she called him later in the day to say that the shoot had delayed so she had to stay. He got angry but in the end there was nothing much he could do. She promised to join them early Sunday morning but the sun was setting and she hadn't arrived. She hadn't called him at all. Neo had called and left so many messages on her phone which she had not replied also.

Neo and Kay had planned the trip so that they could formally propose to their girls and also use the time to plan the wedding. The brothers wanted to have a joint wedding, they wanted to be able to make some choices like the venue and other details themselves before the press found out. They knew that the press would hound them, chasing them everywhere they went and making it difficult for them to be personally involved in their wedding planning. Hence the trip. But all these plans had been ruined by Sara not showing up.

Neo felt equal doses of anger, worry and frustration, and ok maybe a tiny bit of jealously as he watched Kay and Livia playing in the pool.

Nofa, the Bakoro plantation.

UD had been thinking about what they had seen all through the journey home. It turns out that Edward wasn't lying afterall. The portrait was that of a young girl, shouldn't be more than a year or two older than her age now. The girl was seated in front of a mirror. She was wearing a long white dress and had placed her hand on the mirror. She had long hair. From her painted reflection in the mirror, one could see she was beautiful. They had the same lips, same head shape and her hair also had thick red locks in it but as far as UD was concerned that was where the similarities ended. There was no way she was going to delude herself into believing that the beautiful young girl in the picture looked anything like her. No way! Not even when Tiana also agreed with that absurd observation.

Their front door was unlocked when they got to the house. Lesly swore that he'd locked it in the morning before they left. Cautiously, they entered the looking for signs of intrusion or an intruder. Everything looked okay in the parlour and in the living room when they got there but noises from the kitchen made the three move there to investigate.

Lo and behold, they found a familiar elderly woman seated at the table sipping a glass of juice. She looked up at them and smiled.

"Grandma!" UD exclaimed. She quickly moved from behind her parents to her grandmother. Grandma pulled UD down for a hug after which she urged her into a seat beside her.

UD smiled(the UD version of a smile). Anytime grandma visited she was very happy because she finally had someone to be with instead of being the out-of-place third party in her parents' love nest. Grandma loved the outdoors. She could never stay in the house for long and UD was her partner in crime, as her grandma called her. They went for walks in the plantation, to the stream, looking for wild birds and any other thing that appealed to her grandma's wild side.

"You didn't tell us that you'd be coming to visit. We thought that someone had broken into the house." UD said.

"I figured. It's obvious from the power rangers pose your parents are showing off over there." Grandma laughed. "Come and sit down you two. I don't plan to die now so both of you stop behaving like you've seen a ghost."

Na'ama sat down first and Lesly joined a moment later. "Ma you've got to stop this type of things you do. You're going to give someone a heart attack someday."