A woman near the entrance let her eyes sweep past me and then snap back. I watched the change move across her face: recognition, confusion, alarm. She turned to the person beside her and said something low. That person turned to look, and the whisper began to pass the way whispers pass at Nigerian gatherings, fast and electric from person to person until it reached someone who turned around fully.
“Is that not his wife? The one from America?”
The music did not stop, but something shifted in the air. Something tightened. Heads turned in my direction. Eyes found me standing there by the gate with my suitcases.
Then Emeka, following the line of too many gazes, turned too.
He looked at me.
For a long moment he just looked, the way a person looks at something they cannot immediately make sense of, something that has arrived without permission, something the mind has no ready response for.
Then something moved across his face, something I studied carefully because I had 3 years of practice reading his expressions through a phone screen.
It was not guilt.
It was not shock.
It was irritation.
The bride had followed his eyes. She looked at me, and I looked at her. Whatever she had been told about that man, about his past, about his life, about his first marriage, it had not included me. I could see that plainly. She was as blindsided as I was, only in a different way.
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