And the people listened.
Of course they listened.
Not because that story made sense, but because it fit the shape of a narrative they already knew: the woman who travels and loses herself, the husband left behind, patient and long-suffering, eventually forced to move on.
It was a story Lagos had told a hundred times.
Nobody asked for my side. Not a single elder. Not 1 auntie who had danced at our wedding. Not the pastor who had joined our hands together and told us that what God had put together no man should put asunder. They had already decided.
Why was it that when a marriage broke, the first thing a family did was believe the person who stayed rather than investigate what had actually happened? Why did physical presence automatically equal innocence? Why did distance automatically equal guilt?
I had been in Houston working double shifts to build a future for a marriage that was being dismantled behind my back, and somehow I was the one who had abandoned something.
I went to my room that afternoon, the bedroom Emeka and I had shared, the 1 I had paid to have renovated, the 1 whose new curtains I had chosen from a shop in Houston and shipped home because I wanted it to feel different when I returned.
The curtains were there.
My clothes were gone.
My side of the wardrobe had been cleared, not moved to another room, not packed into boxes, gone, as though I had never lived there, as though my presence in that space had been so thoroughly erased that even my absence had been tidied away.
In their place, hanging where my dresses used to be, were a woman’s clothes I did not recognize: blouses, wrappers, a row of shoes lined up neatly on the floor. On the bedside table that used to hold my Bible and my hand cream was a framed photograph of Emeka and Chinwe smiling at the camera with the ease of 2 people who had been told that space was theirs.
I stood in that doorway for a long time.
Then I walked to the window and looked out at the compound below, at the last of the wedding canopies being folded and loaded onto a truck.
I thought about what my lawyer friend Adaora had told me before I left Houston.
“Document everything, Ada. Every transfer, every receipt, every conversation you can record. Do not walk back into that situation without paper behind you.”
I had listened to her.
I turned away from the window, and then I found it.
It was in the drawer of the small writing desk in the corner of the room, the desk I had bought, the desk I had carried up those stairs myself on the day we moved in.
A document. Several pages folded together.
I opened them slowly.
Divorce papers.
My name was on them. His name was on them. The date on them was 8 months earlier.
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