From A Producer To A Global Superstar

Chapter 468: The Conversation

The apartment had begun to feel like an extension of him.

Dayo noticed it in the way he moved through the doorway now, no longer hesitating at the threshold, no longer feeling like a visitor in a space that belonged to someone else. His jacket went on the same hook each time. He knew which floorboard creaked near the kitchen. He knew the sound of Jennifer’s cry well enough to distinguish hunger from discomfort without asking. And he knew, with the precision of a man who noticed everything, that Luna was watching him with a question she had not yet found the words to ask.

He arrived earlier than usual, slipping out of a meeting that Sharon had scheduled and driven straight to her building with the same urgency he used to reserve for studios and competitions. The elevator ride was too slow. The walk down her hallway felt longer than it was. When he knocked, Abishola opened the door.

She looked at him with the expression she had been wearing for days now, the one that sat between maternal warmth and something sharper. Observation. She saw him. She saw everything.

"You come again," she said, stepping aside to let him in. It was not a complaint.

"I told you I would."

"You told me a lot of things." Abishola turned back toward the kitchen, where the smell of something simmering filled the apartment with a weight that felt almost deliberate. "But you still have not told her what she needs to hear."

Dayo froze in the act of removing his shoes. "What does she need to hear?"

Abishola did not answer immediately. She stirred the pot on the stove with slow, methodical movements, her back to him, her head wrap perfectly tied, her presence filling the kitchen the way it had filled every kitchen she had ever stood in.

"Jennifer is sleeping," she said instead. "Luna is in the room with her. Amanda stepped out to get something from the store. We have time. Sit down."

It was not a request he could already see that from they way she talked.

Dayo walked to the small dining table and sat in the chair that had somehow become his over the past two weeks. The wood was worn smooth where his arms rested. Abishola brought two cups of water and set one in front of him. She sat across from him, folding her hands together on the table, looking at him with the steadiness that had always made him feel seen before he was ready to be.

"How long are you going to do this?" she asked.

"Do what?"

"This." She gestured with one hand, a small motion that encompassed the apartment, the routine, the dance he and Luna had been performing. "Coming here every day. Playing with your daughter. Eating dinner. Pretending that you are just a visitor. Pretending that this is not your home."

Dayo picked up the cup and drank, using the motion to buy time. "It is not my home, Mom. It is Luna’s."

"And Luna?" Abishola tilted her head. "Who does she belong to? Who does Jennifer belong to? You think they are just two people you visit? You think this is a hotel you check into and out of?"

"I am being present. You told me to be present."

"I told you to be a father. I did not tell you to be a ghost." Abishola leaned forward slightly, her voice dropping without losing strength. "You walk in here, you hold your child, you smile, you eat, you leave. And the whole time, you and Luna are circling each other like two people afraid to touch that conversation. It is painful to watch. It is confusing for the child, even if she is too young to understand now. And it is dishonest."

Dayo set the cup down harder than he intended. "I am not being dishonest."

"Then what are you being? Scared? Careful? Controlled?" Abishola’s eyes did not waver. "I am a Yoruba woman, Dayo. I know what tradition says. I know what marriage means. I know what family should look like. But I also know that I am in America now, and my son is not a child, and the woman in the other room is the mother of my granddaughter. Tradition matters. But truth matters more. And the truth is that you love her. You have loved her since before Jennifer. You have loved her through the break, through the silence, through everything. And she loves you. I see it in the way she looks at you when you are not looking back. I see it in the way she leaves space for you at this table before you even arrive. I see it in the way her breathing changes when you walk into a room or is it when your hands mistakely have the slight contact you name it."

Dayo’s jaw tightened. "It is not that simple."

"It is exactly that simple." Abishola stood up, her chair scraping softly against the floor. "You are making it complicated because you are afraid. Because the last time you let yourself love her, she walked away. And it broke something in you that you have never admitted was broken. But you are a father now. You do not have the luxury of brokenness. You do not have the luxury of fear. Jennifer deserves a complete family. Not two people who love each other but are too proud or too damaged to say it. This is no ego game; it’s the life of your daughter and how she would grow up to be imagine you grew up without a father or a mother, huh? Do you want that for your daughter you better wise up o."

She walked to the stove and turned down the heat, her back to him. "When Luna comes out, you will talk. You will stop hiding. Or I will ask the question myself, and you will answer it in front of your mother. Your choice."

Dayo sat at the table, the cup of water in front of him, his hands pressed flat against the wood. He felt the weight of his mother’s words settling into his chest like stones dropped into deep water. She was right. He knew she was right. But knowing something and being able to act on it were separated by a distance he had not been able to cross.

He thought about the last time Luna had left. The silence of the apartment he had shared with her, the way the air went stale, the way he stopped sleeping through the night. He had told himself it was pride. He had told himself it was logic, that if she could walk away then she was never truly his. But the truth, the truth he kept locked in the part of himself that no one else could see, was that her leaving had devastated him in a way that nothing else ever had. Not competition losses. Not industry betrayals. Not the accumulated failures of a life spent building walls so high that even he sometimes forgot what was behind them.

He had never loved anyone the way he loved her. In his entire existence, across every version of himself he had been, he had never let anyone close enough to wound him this deeply. And the wound had not healed. It had simply scabbed over, waiting for her to return and tear it open again.

The bedroom door opened.

Luna stepped out, her movements quiet, careful, the practiced silence of a mother who had learned to move without waking a sleeping child. She wore something simple, a loose shirt and pants, her hair pulled back, her face bare of anything except the fatigue that came from caring for a baby and the tension that came from caring for too much else.

She saw him at the table and stopped. Her eyes moved from him to Abishola at the stove, reading the energy in the room with the same sensitivity she applied to everything. From her career to her personal life, she knew something was about to happen.

"Hi," she said softly.

"Hi."

Abishola turned, wiping her hands on a cloth. "Luna, come and sit. The food will be ready soon. I want to talk to both of you before Amanda returns and before Jennifer wakes up."

Luna walked to the table, her steps slow, her expression shifting into something guarded. She sat in the chair beside Dayo, not across from him, and the proximity felt deliberate and uncomfortable. Close enough to touch. Far enough to pretend they weren’t.

"What is it?" Luna asked, looking at Abishola.

Abishola leaned against the counter, her arms crossed, her gaze moving between them with the authority of a woman who had decided she was done waiting.

"I am going to ask a question," she said. "And I want an honest answer. Not the answer you think I want to hear. Not the answer that protects your pride. The truth."

Luna glanced at Dayo. He was looking down at his hands, his expression carefully neutral, the mask he wore when he was preparing for something he did not want to face.

"What is Jennifer to you?" Abishola asked Dayo.

"She is my daughter."

"And Luna?"

Dayo’s throat moved. "She is Jennifer’s mother."

"That is not what I asked." Abishola’s voice sharpened slightly. "I asked what she is to you. Not what relation she has to your child. What she is to you. Here." She touched her chest. "Inside. What is she?"

The room went quiet. The sound of the simmering pot became loud, filling the silence that Dayo was not answering.

Luna was watching him now. Not with expectation, but with a patience that was somehow worse. She was waiting to see if he would hide again. If he would deflect again. If he would use his control as a shield the way he always did.

"She is..." Dayo started, then stopped. The word was there, but it stuck in his throat, heavy and dangerous, the kind of admission that once spoken could not be taken back.

"She is what?" Abishola pressed her eyes, squinting like a Yoruba human ready to bounce out if she didn’t get the reply she needed.

Dayo looked up. Not at his mother. At Luna. And in her eyes, he saw the same thing he felt. The exhaustion. The fear. The hope that was buried so deep it was almost indistinguishable from pain.

"She is the only person I have ever loved," he said.

The words came out rough, broken, nothing like the controlled statements he usually crafted. They fell between them like something fragile and irreplaceable, and Luna’s expression shifted, the guard dropping so quickly it almost looked like she had been struck.

Abishola nodded once, a small, private gesture of satisfaction. Then she turned back to the stove, giving them the space she had just forced open.

"Then act like it," she said quietly. "Both of you. Act like it, or stop pretending. Jennifer will not wait forever for her parents to figure out what they mean to each other."

She busied herself at the stove, her back to them, the conversation closed from her end but left wide open between them she had done what she could it left for them o finish it after all she cant babysit two adult who clearly know what they wnat but dont act like it she had to step in for the sake of her grandchild and for both of them else she knew her son wouldn’t.

Luna was still looking at Dayo. Her eyes were bright, too bright, the moisture in them held back by willpower alone.

"You never said that before," she whispered.

"I have never said a lot of things." Dayo’s voice was quieter now, stripped of the armor he usually wore. "I thought if I said them, they would give you power over me. I thought if I let you see how much you mattered, you would leave again, and I would not survive it."

Luna’s hand moved across the table, stopping just short of his. "Dayo..."

"When you left," he continued, the words coming faster now, unstoppable, "I stopped functioning. Not for a day. Not for a week. For months. I went through the motions. I performed. I competed. I smiled for cameras. But inside, nothing was working. I could not sleep without medication. I could not eat without forcing myself. I built walls so high after that, I convinced myself I did not need anyone behind them. And then you came back. With Jennifer. And the walls fell, and I realized I had been standing in rubble for two years, pretending it was a fortress."

Luna’s breath hitched. She pressed her hand against her mouth, her eyes closing for a moment as she absorbed what he was saying.

"You said I never cheated," Dayo said, his voice dropping even lower. "You were right. I never cheated. But I failed you. When Alice told me how she felt, I did not shut her down. I stood there, silent, because some part of me was terrified of commitment, of giving you everything and having you leave anyway. And that silence hurt you more than any action could have. I know that now. I knew it then, but I was too afraid to face it."

He turned his hand on the table, palm up, an offering he had never made before.

"I am still afraid," he said. "Every day I come here, I am afraid that you will decide I am not enough. That Jennifer will grow up and realize her father was a man who had everything except the courage to love her mother properly. I am afraid that if I ask you for what I really want, you will say no, and I will have to learn how to survive without you all over again. And I do not know if I can."

Luna lowered her hand from her mouth. Her fingers were trembling. She looked at him with an expression that was part wonder, part grief, part something that was slowly becoming hope.

"When I left," she said, her voice thick, "I told myself it was because you did not choose me. Because you let Alice stand there with her confession and you did not push her away. But the truth is, I was also afraid. I was afraid that I was not enough for you. That you would eventually realize I was too simple, too quiet, too ordinary for the life you were building. So I left before you could leave me. And then we met at your birthday party after we had that night, I found out I was pregnant, and I was terrified. Terrified of telling you, terrified of what it would mean, terrified that you would think I was trapping you. So I ran. I hid. I made myself smaller so that you would not find me."

She reached out and took his hand. Her fingers laced through his, warm and real and present.

"But watching you with Jennifer," she continued, "watching the way you look at her, the way you hold her, the way you come here every day even though you are running a label and planning a competition and carrying the weight of everything else... it makes me realize I was wrong. You were not the one who needed to prove himself. I was the one who needed to trust. And I did not. I failed you, too."

Dayo squeezed her hand. The contact was slight, but it carried the weight of everything unsaid between them.

"I do not want to keep visiting," he said. "I do not want to be the man who knocks on the door and leaves at the end of the night. I want to be here. In the morning, when Jennifer wakes up. In the middle of the night, when she cries. I want to be the person you argue with about whose turn it is to change her. I want to be the person who brings you coffee when you are too tired to move. I want to be your partner. Not just Jennifer’s father. Yours. If you will let me."

Luna looked at their joined hands. She was crying now, the tears moving silently down her face, but she was not trying to hide them.

"I am scared," she said. "I am scared that we will try again and the same thing will happen. I am scared that your world will swallow mine, that the music and the competitions and the fame will pull you away and leave me holding the pieces again. I am scared that Jennifer will grow up and see us fail, and she will think love is just two people who could not make it work."

"So am I," Dayo said. "I am scared of all of that. But I am more scared of never trying. Of watching you raise our daughter from a distance, of knowing that I loved you and never told you, of dying with the regret that I let fear win when love was right in front of me."

He reached up with his free hand and touched her cheek, his thumb brushing away a tear.

"I do not have a plan for this," he said. "I do not have a strategy. I cannot manage this the way I manage everything else. I can only promise you that I will show up. Every day. Even when I am scared. Even when I fail. Even when I say the wrong thing or shut down or try to control things I cannot control. I will come back. I will keep coming back. Until you believe me."

Luna leaned into his touch, her eyes closing, her breath shaky. She stayed that way for a long moment, letting the words settle, letting the truth find its place between them.

"I believe you," she whispered. "I do not know if that is enough. I do not know if we can fix what we broke. But I believe you. And I want to try."

Dayo felt something crack open inside him. Not dramatically. Not with sound or light. Just a fundamental shift, the kind that happened quietly, when a man who had been holding his breath finally exhaled.

He pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her, feeling her press against his chest with a need that matched his own. They held each other at the small dining table, in the apartment that had become his second home, while Abishola stirred the pot in the background and pretended not to notice the two people behind her finally choosing each other over their fear.

"I love you," Luna said into his shoulder, the words muffled but clear.

"I love you too," Dayo answered, and the admission no longer felt like weakness.

It felt like the first true thing he had said in years.

In the bedroom, Jennifer stirred in her crib, her small hand opening and closing in the air, dreaming of a world she did not yet know was being rebuilt around her. Amanda returned from the store, stopping in the doorway with bags in her hands, taking in the scene at the table with a small smile before backing out silently to give them the space they needed.

And in the kitchen, Abishola tasted the stew, adjusted the seasoning, and allowed herself a private moment of satisfaction.

The family was not whole yet. There was still damage to repair, trust to rebuild, a future to define. But the silence had finally broken. And for the first time in a very long time, the people in this room were moving in the same direction, toward something that might actually last.

Dayo held Luna, and he let himself feel it. All of it. The fear, the hope, the love that had terrified him for so long because it was the one thing he could not control.

He did not need to control it anymore.

He just needed to hold on.