“Afraid of what? That I wouldn’t marry you? That I’d realize you built this whole relationship on omissions? That I’d see you clearly?”
“Yes,” he says, and the simplicity of it cuts clean.
You laugh bitterly. “At least one of us finally can.”
The sentence hangs there, vicious and shining.
He absorbs that too.
You turn away from him because if you keep looking, you will either collapse or forgive him too early, and both options disgust you. In the bathroom mirror above the sink, your reflection waits like an old enemy. Your makeup is still mostly intact, but tears have carved pale paths through the powder. The high collar of your dress frames the edges of grafted skin. The left side of your jaw still tightens differently when you cry. The ear that required reconstruction always seems slightly too delicate, as though it belongs to someone else.
You remember how hard it was, in the beginning, to stand in front of any mirror at all.
At twenty, you learned that people will tell you survival is what matters, as if survival is a neat little gift box tied with courage. They do not tell you about the smaller deaths that follow. The barber who startled when he uncovered your neck. The child on the bus who asked his mother why your face looked melted. The man at church who said, “At least you’re alive,” with the bright cruelty of someone grateful your suffering gave him perspective over lunch.
And the men. Dear God, the men.
The ones who stared too long because pain can also attract a certain kind of voyeur. The ones who overperformed kindness like they wanted applause for not recoiling. The one who told you, over coffee you should never have agreed to, that your “story” was inspiring but he “did still want children who wouldn’t inherit… complications,” as though scars traveled through blood like shame.
Eventually you stopped trying.
You volunteered for extra shifts. You tied scarves high around your throat. You learned exactly which angle offered strangers the least to gawk at. You became efficient, competent, useful. You made yourself into a life no one could call pretty but no one could call pitiful either.
Then came Obinna with his patience and his listening hands and the way he never flinched when your voice trembled. You loved him because beside him, you did not feel hidden. Now you wonder if you were simply hidden in a different way.
Behind you, his voice enters the bathroom doorway carefully.
“There’s more.”
Of course there is. Tonight is a Russian doll of disasters.
You keep your eyes on the mirror. “Say it.”
“The surgery in India… that part is true. I began seeing shadows three months ago. More than shadows now. Not perfectly. My vision is still limited. Bright light hurts. Faces blur at a distance. But yes, I can see enough.”
You shut your eyes.
“And?”
He hesitates.
That hesitation tells you the next thing will be worse.
“And the day I first saw your face clearly… I understood why I fell in love with you so quickly.”
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