leesatobon
When twenty-one-year-old Yewande Badmus - the glamorous, directionless eldest daughter of Lagos billionaire Chief Biodun Badmus has always felt her life to be a reality show where she had to perform for hidden cameras-be the deserving first daughter of a billionaire, attend functions, smile for the cameras and not bring embarrassment to the Badmus name. She is caught skipping her mandatory NYSC postings, her mother delivers swift justice: two days of volunteer work at the Family, Healthcare and Life Foundation, run by a quietly serious offshore engineer named Michael Osakwe.
Yewande arrives with a designer bag, a standing bribe offer, and absolutely no intention of staying.
She stays for months.
Michael Osakwe has been building FHL since he was twenty-two years old - one hospital deposit, one sick child, one donation at a time. At twenty-nine, he runs a foundation that has become his whole life: disciplined, purposeful, and entirely devoid of the romantic complications he has spent years avoiding. The moment Yewande Badmus walks into the ballroom at his fundraiser - eyes on her phone, unbothered, effortlessly beautiful - he knows he is in trouble.
What follows is a slow-burn love story set against the vivid backdrop of contemporary Lagos - the wealth and contradictions of Banana Island, the electricity of the FHL outreach programmes, the warmth of hospital corridors and goodwill store sorting rooms, the pressure of old money and new ambition pressing in from every direction.
Yewande is not who anyone has taken her for. Underneath the cool, clipped confidence and the trail of abandoned commitments is a young woman who has never quite believed she was worth believing in - and who has never been seen, quietly and consistently, the way Michael sees her. Through the foundation's work, she discovers something she has never had before: a reason to show up that has nothing to do with performance or approval.