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The Rightful Heir
Paperback
Series: Success by Choice, Book 2
ISBN13: 9789789676989
Publisher: Affluent Innovative Concepts
Published: May 4 2026
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.38 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What makes a family-blood, or the love that binds people together?
Anthony and Phebe Oja have been married for fifteen years without a child. Though successful and comfortable, the absence of children leaves a painful emptiness in their lives.
Then Mallam Haruna Yakubu asks Anthony a question that changes everything:
How many children do you need?
Instead of continuing to wait for a biological child, Anthony and Phebe choose to become parents in an extraordinary way. They adopt four children and give them the complete love, care, upbringing, and security of their own children. They do not want the children to grow up thinking of themselves as adopted. They want them to know only one reality: they are Oja children.
They protect that decision so carefully that even Mallam Haruna, the man who inspired them, does not know what they have done. The four children grow up in a loving and united family, completely unaware of the truth about their origins.
Then, when Phebe is fifty-eight, something no one expected happens.
She gives birth to a son.
They name him Idago, meaning miracle and wonder. His arrival brings extraordinary joy to the family, but it does not change the way the Ojas love their children. Idago simply becomes the youngest of five.
For years, the family remains united. No one knows that Idago is the only biological child of Anthony and Phebe.
Then Phebe dies.
After her death, Anthony-fearing what may happen when the truth eventually emerges-breaks the promise he made with his late wife and reveals the secret to the older children. But he pleads with them to ensure that Idago never learns the truth.
The older children are devastated by what they discover. Yet their pain gradually gives way to something deeper: overwhelming gratitude.
They realize that the two people they called Father and Mother had given them a kind of love and acceptance that many biological parents might never give. They had been deliberately protected from ever feeling like second-class children. Even after Idago was born-their parents' only biological child-the Ojas continued to treat all five children as one family.
When circumstances surrounding the family's business and inheritance eventually bring the older siblings face-to-face with Idago, they make a decision their father never wanted them to make.
They tell him the truth.
Not because they are fighting for their own inheritance, but because they believe Idago should receive what belongs to him-and because they feel compelled to honour the extraordinary love and sacrifice of the parents who gave them everything.
For Idago, however, discovering that he is the only biological child-and therefore the rightful heir-is not a triumph.
It is a painful burden.
He struggles with questions of identity, belonging, fairness, love, and the meaning of family. How can he suddenly stand above the brothers and sister he has always known as his family? How can blood change what years of love have already established?
The Rightful Heir is an emotionally powerful story about family, sacrifice, identity, inheritance, and the extraordinary power of love.
It asks:
Does blood alone make a family?
Can the love, sacrifice, and years shared between people be greater than biology?
And when truth finally comes, can a family built on love survive the weight of it?
John I UmoruAlso from
Umoru, John I.
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