DO NOT OPEN THAT DOOR

Prima has always believed she is her father's favourite.

He comes home by five every evening to tell his daughters stories of their people. He insists they speak their mother tongue at home, even though they attend some of the best schools in Uganda. He teaches Prima to look a man straight in the eye and give him a firm handshake. When she goes to boarding school, he visits her again and again. She is ten years old, the eldest of five girls, and her world feels warm and certain.

Then comes Christmas Eve, 1997.

As they do every year, the family travels to the village with their Sunday best and their baskets of food, ready to celebrate with grandparents, aunties and uncles. But this year the cousins are whispering. Prima's father, they say, is bringing home a new wife. A wife who might give him the one thing five daughters never can: a son to inherit everything he owns.

That night, Prima's mother locks her daughters inside the house and turns off every light. In the dark, Prima hears her pacing the hallway. Then the footsteps come. Her father and his brothers are at the door, pounding and shouting. Her father taps on her bedroom window and calls her name, begging her to let him in.

Prima's hand is already on the doorknob when her mother's voice cuts through the dark.

Prima, do not open that door.

What happens next will break a family in two and set a quiet, stubborn girl on a road she never imagined.

A story of love and betrayal, of mothers and daughters, and of what it costs to claim what was always yours.