🎉 It’s My Birthday — And I Wrote You a Novella
Today is July 3rd. It’s my birthday. And instead of asking you to celebrate me, I want to do what I do best… tell you a story.
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What the Water Kept is a novella about a woman named Folake who inherits a house she doesn’t want, on the condition that she live in it for ninety days. What she finds there isn’t just water damage and old furniture, it’s a secret her grandmother carried for sixty years, a sister nobody knew existed, and a life she didn’t realize she’d built to fit someone else’s shape instead of her own.
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I didn’t write it because I had a neat idea for a plot. I wrote it because I kept thinking about all the things families don’t say out loud. The silences we inherit without ever agreeing to carry them, the version of ourselves we quietly shrink to fit into someone else’s design, and what it actually takes to walk back through a door we were once too afraid to open. Some of that is imagined. Some of it is closer to home than I’ll say here. That’s usually how the truest fiction works.
Why release it today, of all days?
Because birthdays have always felt, to me, like doorways rather than milestones; a chance to close one year honestly and open the next one with something true in your hands. Last year, on this exact day, I made a quiet promise to myself that if I ever finished this story, I’d give it away rather than gate it behind anything. Not because the work isn’t worth paying for, but because the story itself is about a woman who spent sixty years too afraid to give something away for free; her truth, her daughter, her whole first life; and I didn’t want to build my own launch around the same fear I’d just spent months writing my way out of.
So: What the Water Kept is free today. No sample chapter that stops right before the good part. The whole novella, all nineteen chapters and the epilogue, is yours.
If it moves you the way it moved me to write it, and you’d like to leave a birthday tip, there’s a place for that at the end of the book, but it will never, ever be a condition of reading it. Some things are meant to be given away completely, the way Folake’s grandmother in this story finally learned to do, sixty years later than she should have.
A little about the book itself:
- A novella in three parts — The Will, The House, and What the Water Kept
- Set between Lagos and Epe, following Folake as she restores a house, uncovers a family secret, and quietly rebuilds her own life in the process
- About mothers and daughters, sisters who find each other decades late, and the specific, patient work of restoring something — a house, a family, a self — properly, instead of just papering over the cracks
Get your free copy → [Subscribe at the end of this blog post and get “What the Water Kept” sent directly to your inbox]
Thank you for being here and for reading my words on ordinary Tuesdays and extraordinary birthdays alike. This blog, this story, this whole small, stubborn body of work exists because you keep showing up for it. That’s the real gift this year.
If you read it, I’d love to hear what you thought. Leave a comment, send a message, or just sit with it a while some stories are meant to be lived in slowly, like an old house with good bones.
With love and gratitude (and one more candle),
Aisha 🎂
P.S. — If this story finds its way into your hands and you know someone who needs a reminder that it’s not too late to tell the truth, or find the sister, or walk through the door — send it their way too. Every share helps keep African storytelling alive.
Follow along at www.aishasavvy.com and on Instagram/TikTok @aishasavvy for more stories, behind-the-scenes notes, and what’s coming next.
Get your free copy → [Subscribe below and get “What the Water Kept” sent directly to your inbox]
