Kamsi’s own mother said it gently one evening, when they were shelling egusi together on the veranda, not looking at her, as though the words were meant for the bowl.
“I’m not saying rush, my daughter. I’m just saying don’t sleep. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t sleep.”
“I’m not sleeping, Mama.”
“Good. Because this life does not refund time.”
Kamsi nodded and said nothing more. She cracked another seed between her fingers and let the silence sit between them without filling it.
She found a small learning center three streets away that needed someone to teach English and basic literacy to young children in the evenings. It paid very little. She took it without hesitation. During the days, she read. She wrote. She thought carefully and without panic about what she actually wanted her life to look like when no one was watching and no one was measuring.
Her friends were making different calculations.
Chioma had already begun attending every owambe and church social within a ten-kilometer radius, dressed with deliberate intention, arriving early enough to be noticed and late enough to be remembered.
Ada had started spending more time at her uncle’s shop in the market, not out of interest in the business, but because the men who came in to buy building materials were often the kind of men who were building something: a house, a future, a life they were ready to share.
Ifunanya had doubled her presence on social media, posting carefully arranged photographs from angles that made her family’s modest sitting room look like something from a Lagos interior design account. She was casting a net, and she was casting it wide.
And Kamsi watched all of it, not with judgment, not with pride, but with the quiet attention of someone who understood that the choices her friends were making were not made in selfishness alone. They were made in fear.
And fear, she knew, was always loudest in a town that never stopped watching.
Umuahia was watching, and all four of them could feel it.
Chioma was the first.
Nobody was surprised. Chioma had always moved with intention. She decided things the way she filed her nails, with calm, deliberate strokes, until the edge was exactly where she wanted it.
The man she found was called Emeka. He owned two filling stations in Owerri and drove a black Lexus that he washed himself every Saturday morning, which Chioma took as a sign of discipline. He was fifteen years older than her, quiet in the way that men who have money often are, as though they have already said everything worth saying and are simply waiting for the world to catch up.
They courted for four months. The introduction was loud and colorful. The wedding was louder.
“I told you all, a woman should never struggle when a man can carry the weight. That’s not laziness. That’s wisdom.”
“Chioma, you have done well, oh. You have done very well.”
“Be happy, Chioma.”
“I mean it.”
She bought the asoebi in burgundy and gold. She danced at the reception until her feet ached. She stood in every photograph with her whole chest, her smile reaching her eyes because she genuinely wished her friend well, even if she did not share her reasons.
When the last song played and the last guests spilled out into the warm night air, Kamsi drove home alone, the music still faint behind her, and sat for a while in the dark of her small room before turning on the light.
Ada was next, five months later.
Her husband’s name was Tobenna, a civil servant who wore ironed shirts and came home at the same time every evening. He was not exciting. Ada had never asked for exciting. She had asked specifically and without apology for calm, for a man who would not raise his voice, for a home where the air did not feel like it was waiting to catch fire.
Tobenna offered all of this.
His mother was traditional, and his family was old-fashioned. But Ada had decided that old-fashioned was not the same as bad, that there was, in fact, a kind of safety in knowing exactly what you were walking into.
“I know what people think. They think I settled. But I have peace, Kamsi. Even now, before the wedding, I already have peace.”
“You do, my friend, and I’m so happy for you. Congratulations, Ada. I mean that, too.”
“Thank you so much. It means a lot.”
Ada’s wedding was quieter than Chioma’s, but no less beautiful. Ivory lace, a church ceremony that made three women cry, and a reception where Tobenna’s family served the best akpu Kamsi had ever tasted. She ate two plates and danced with Ada’s younger cousins and tried not to think too hard about anything.
On the drive home, Ifunanya called her.
“Two down, two to go. Kamsi, our turn is coming, oh.”
“Go and sleep, Ifunanya.”
“I’m serious. Don’t let them leave us behind.”
“Good night.”
She hung up and drove the rest of the way in silence.
Ifunanya did not take long.
She met Desmond at a mutual friend’s birthday party in Enugu, a party she had dressed for with the focused energy of someone on a mission, which she was. Desmond was everything she had described in her vision: tall, well-traveled, free with money in the particular way that made people around him feel special simply by proximity.
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