The End of the Illusion

Damilare was home when she got back.

He was sitting in the living room with the television on and the volume low, the way he sat when he was waiting for something he did not want to name. He looked up when she came in and she could see him reading her face the way people read faces when they are afraid of what they will find.

She sat in the chair across from him. Not beside him. Across.

“I spoke to Tobi,” she said.

Something moved through his expression. Not surprise exactly. The particular resignation of a man who had known a conversation was coming and had simply not known which direction it would arrive from.

“He told you,” Damilare said.

“He told me he has known for six months.” She kept her voice even. “He told me he asked you seven months ago and you said it was handled.”

Damilare leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor. The television behind him showed a man in a suit talking about something neither of them was listening to.

“I meant it,” he said. “When I told him that. I meant it every time I told myself that.”

“But you didn’t handle it.”

“No.”

The honesty of the no was unexpected. No qualification. No reaching for context. Just no.

She looked at him across the room, this man she had agreed to marry, this man who cooked eggs on Sunday mornings and wore reading glasses only at home and had loved her in the way that he knew how to love, which she was only now understanding was not the same as loving her in the way she needed to be loved.

“Who is she?” Nneka asked.

“Someone I knew before you.” He paused. “Someone I did not finish things with properly before I started things with you.”

“Did you love her?”

The same question she had asked on Friday. She needed to hear the answer again in daylight, without the buffer of exhaustion and egusi soup.

He was quiet for a long time.

“I think I was afraid of what I felt for her,” he said finally. “So I made a different choice. A safer choice.”

The words arrived in her chest like something she recognised.

A safer choice.

She thought about Kelechi. She thought about a phone call four years ago and a silence and a name said once before the line went dead. She thought about her mother’s hand on hers and the pride in her voice and the word sensible used like a compliment when it was also a cage.

She and Damilare had both made safer choices.

They had made them with each other.

“I’m not angry,” she said, and meant it, which surprised her. “I think I should be angrier than I am.”

He looked up.

“I think we have both been performing something,” she said carefully. “I think we have been very good at it and I think we convinced ourselves and I think that is its own kind of dishonesty even when nobody intended it.”

He looked at her for a long time. “Are you saying you don’t want to marry me?”

She did not answer immediately. She sat with the question the way she had been sitting with questions for weeks, letting it exist without rushing toward a resolution.

“I’m saying I don’t know who we are without the performance,” she said. “And I think we need to know that before we stand in front of everyone we love and make a promise.”

The television man in the suit continued talking.

Damilare nodded slowly, not in agreement exactly, in the way people nodded when they were receiving something they had no immediate answer for.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“Time,” she said. “And honesty. From both of us.”

She got up and went to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands and stayed that way for a long time, not crying, just existing inside the enormity of a Sunday that had begun with untouched water bottles in a café and arrived here.

She thought about Tobi’s yes.

She thought about what it meant and what it could not mean and what it would cost everyone if it became anything more than one word spoken across a table.

She thought about all of this and went to sleep still thinking about it and woke in the early hours with the absolute clarity of a woman who had been avoiding a truth for so long that the truth had simply decided to arrive without her permission.

To be continued…