In many Gothic novels, the house isn’t merely a metaphor—it is a character and entity in its own right, more important than some of the characters. In the majority of Gothic novels, the girl ends up staying with the man—that is, the house. In some cases (Jane Eyre, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca) the house ends up getting destroyed somewhere along the way—a trope that Eleanor Hibbert, who evidently had a Thing for Houses, tried to counter, and Barbara Mertz, who had a Thing for Archaeology, liked to mock.

I am well familiar with the phenomenon of death penalty proponents who hate it when a convict is proven innocent because they see the penalty itself as an absolute good that needs to be nurtured, like a beloved pet, regardless of the facts of any individual case. The way the system works now, even when somebody is freed because of exonerating evidence, the state still has every incentive to deny the facts and call the conviction justified, regardless.

I grew up where the temperature hardly ever dropped below seventy degrees Fahrenheit. My first experience of real cold was extremely unpleasant. Nikki, the protagonist of the story, comes from the same background, and I imagined this setting as especially horrifying within her context. Nikki has never been so far north and she doesn’t have the luxury of indoor heating (as I did, when I needed to flee from the cold). For her, this environment is stark beyond imagining, yet she endures through this hardship.

Shortly before I started writing this story, there was a viral message being forwarded via WhatsApp. I believe the message originated here in Nigeria, but I’ve heard that it has made rounds in other countries, too. It was a set of rules advising women on how to be good and “godly” wives. This list was really long, and several points in it were backed by Bible verses. These rules perfectly highlighted some of the pressure women face in Nigeria, so I decided to borrow some of them to tell this story. That said, the number in the title is arbitrary.