The Scroll

He should have put the phone down.

He knew that. Some part of him, the part that still loved her, the part that had slow-danced with her at his cousin Biodun’s wedding two months ago, that part was screaming at him to put it down. To walk into the kitchen. To eat his eggs and say nothing and find another explanation for a message that had no other explanation.

He kept scrolling.

Eight months of messages loaded slowly, the way things do when there is too much of them.

The early ones were careful. Polite almost. Hey, how did the event go? You killed it as usual. Dayo knew her work. He knew the industry. An event planner and whoever this man was moved in the same circles and it had started the way these things always start — casually, innocently, in the space where a friendship is supposed to live.

Emeka scrolled faster.

The messages changed somewhere around November. He could feel the shift even before he read the words. The timestamps got later. Midnight. 1am. 2am. Messages sent from this bed, from beside him, while he slept.

I keep thinking about what you said.

I’ve never talked to anyone the way I talk to you.

Don’t text me this late Dayo I’m serious. Then three minutes later: Okay what did you mean by that.

He stopped at a voice note. Thirty-eight seconds. Sade’s voice, low and careful, the way she spoke when she didn’t want to wake him.

He couldn’t bring himself to play it.

He kept scrolling.

December came and the pretending stopped. No more careful words. No more plausible explanations. Just two people who had already crossed every line talking like they had earned the right to each other.

Then he found the message that took his legs.

Dayo: Does he suspect anything?

Sade: Emeka? 😂 No. He trusts me too much. That’s his problem.

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

Read it again.

That’s his problem.

Not a woman who felt guilty. Not a woman being swept away by something she couldn’t control. A woman who had looked at her husband’s love and called it a weakness. Who had laughed — that emoji, that casual laugh — while describing the man who had just yesterday picked up her dry cleaning and fixed the kitchen cabinet she’d been complaining about for three weeks.

From the kitchen: “Emeka your eggs are ready o.”

He looked up.

He could see her through the open door, plating the food, still in her towel, reaching for the pepper shaker. The morning light was hitting the side of her face and she looked — she looked like Sade. His Sade. The woman in the Zanzibar photo. The woman who cried at the end of every sad film and then denied she had been crying.

That’s his problem.

He went to Dayo’s profile. One tap. Facebook pulled him up in seconds — a man with an easy smile and a clean car and a job at an oil servicing company in Victoria Island. Good-looking in the way that is neither remarkable nor ignorable.

Mutual friends: 3.

He clicked.

The third name stopped him cold.

Biodun Adeyemi.

His cousin. His mother’s sister’s son. The same Biodun who had called him just last month to borrow forty thousand naira for generator fuel. The same Biodun who had sat across from him at Christmas and eaten his food and laughed at his jokes and looked him in the eye.

“Baby your eggs are getting cold.”

He closed everything. Put her phone back. Walked to the bathroom and gripped the sink and looked at the man in the mirror for a long time.

Then he washed his face. Dried it. Walked to the dining table and sat down.

Sade set the plate in front of him and kissed the top of his head.

“Eat,” she said softly.

He picked up his fork.

And decided he would say nothing.

Not yet.

Not until he knew everything.