I felt something unexpected toward her in that moment. Not hatred. Not jealousy. Something closer to sorrow. She had been lied to too.
The compound had gone very quiet. Even the children had stopped. The MC stood at his table with his mouth slightly open and nothing coming out. The music softened and stumbled and went still.
Then I heard footsteps. Slow, deliberate footsteps, the footsteps of someone who had decided.
I looked up and saw her moving through the crowd toward me in deep burgundy lace, wrapper tied high and tight at the chest, coral beads at her throat, the beads she wore only when she wanted to remind everyone in the room who she was.
His mother.
She walked to me without hurrying, without hesitating, without any of the embarrassment that the moment should have demanded. She stopped a few feet away. She looked at me, at my suitcases, at my travel clothes still creased from the long flight, at my face, and she did not look away.
Then she said it, without flinching, without apology, simply, quietly, as though it were almost a reasonable thing to say.
“We thought you weren’t coming back.”
I said nothing.
I just stood there in the compound I had paid for, beneath a sky that did not care what was happening beneath it, while the music slowly and awkwardly found its way back to life around me.
What none of them understood, not Emeka, not his mother, not the bride, not a single person standing in that compound watching me, was that I had not come back empty. I had not come back broken. I had not come back unprepared.
I had come back with receipts.
I had come back with a lawyer.
I had come back with a plan.
And I was about to use all 3.
There is something about Nigerian society that nobody puts in a textbook. When a marriage breaks, it is never the man who broke it. It is always the woman who left. Always the woman who was too ambitious. Always the woman who forgot her place when she traveled. Always the woman who must have been doing something abroad, because why else would a good man look elsewhere?
I had been back in Lagos for less than 6 hours, and already I was the villain of my own story.
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