He bought tables. He tipped generously. He noticed Ifunanya within twenty minutes of her arrival and did not stop noticing her for the rest of the evening.
Their relationship moved like a song played at high speed, intense, dazzling, slightly breathless.
“Look at where he took me for my birthday. Look at this room. Look at this view. This is the life I was telling you people about.”
“Ifunanya, you deserve it. Enjoy yourself.”
“He seems generous. Just make sure you also know him when the trips are over.”
“Kamsi, must you always find something careful to say? Relax. Not everything needs deep analysis.”
“I’m just being thoughtful.”
“Overthinking. And time is exactly what I don’t have to waste. Some of us cannot afford your kind of patience.”
The room shifted slightly. Chioma looked away. Ada adjusted her wrapper. Kamsi nodded once and let it go.
Six months later, Ifunanya’s wedding was the grandest of the three, a two-day affair with a live band, a Lagos-based event planner, and a dress that had been talked about on three different WhatsApp groups before the day even arrived. It was the kind of wedding that made people reach for their phones before they reached for their emotions.
Kamsi wore her asoebi. She danced. She smiled in every photograph. And when the night ended and the lights came down and the generators were switched off one by one, she walked to her car in the sudden quiet and sat behind the wheel without starting the engine.
Three weddings.
Three friends.
Three doors closed on lives she had not chosen.
She was not sad, exactly. She was something more complicated than sad, a feeling that had no clean name in English, but that her grandmother might have described in Igbo as the particular ache of standing still while everything around you moves.
She started the engine.
She drove home.
And somewhere in the dark town of Uguta, a man was already being prepared for her, chosen by the very friends who believed with complete sincerity that they were doing her a kindness.
Walls know everything.
They absorb what people perform for the outside world and hold what is left when the performance ends. They hear the conversations that happen after midnight, the silences that stretch too long over dinner, the sound of a door closed with just slightly too much force. They know the difference between a home and a house, between a marriage and an arrangement, between two people who chose each other and two people who chose what the other represented.
The walls of three different homes in and around Uguta had been listening.
And what they heard was not what the weddings had promised.
In Emeka’s house in Owerri, Chioma had found provision. She had not been wrong about that. The fridges were full. The generator ran all night. The wardrobe he gave her was larger than her childhood bedroom, and every week, without asking, money appeared in the account he had opened in her name.
But Emeka himself was largely absent, not in body, but in presence. He came home. He ate. He watched the news. He slept. On weekends, he visited his mother, a formidable woman who had not entirely accepted that her son’s home now had another woman at its center.
He did not shout. He did not mistreat. He simply occupied space the way furniture did: present, solid, and providing no warmth.
“He’s not a bad man. I want to make that clear. But Ada, I don’t think this man sees me. I mean, really sees me. I am in this house every day, and some evenings I feel like I am invisible.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“I tried.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I should not complain when I have everything I need, that plenty of women would be grateful.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. Ah.”
She had provision. She had comfort. She had a beautiful, quiet, empty life and the particular loneliness of a woman who got exactly what she asked for and discovered it was not quite enough.
Ada’s peace had a texture she had not anticipated.
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