Two Hours

The venue coordinator had the energy of a woman who had seen too many brides change their minds and had decided, somewhere along the way, to stop having feelings about it.

She walked Nneka through the hall with a clipboard and a practiced smile, pointing at ceiling height and lighting rigs and the specific square footage of the reception area like she was selling office space. Nneka nodded at the right moments and took photographs she was not sure she would look at again.

Damilare was supposed to be here.

His message had come at 11:43am. Something came up at work, baby. Send me the pictures. Tobi can go with you so you don’t have to do it alone.

She had stared at the message for a moment, then typed back: Okay.

She had not typed what she was thinking, which was that this was the third appointment in two months that something had come up for.

Tobi was already outside when she arrived, leaning against his car with his phone in his hand, not performing the waiting. He looked up when she approached and said, “Sorry he couldn’t make it,” in the tone of someone who meant the apology and knew it was not enough.

“It’s fine,” she said.

They followed the coordinator together.

Tobi did not try to fill the silence with reassurance. He walked beside her and looked at the same things she looked at and when the coordinator said something worth responding to, he responded. When it was not worth responding to, he did not. Nneka found this quietly extraordinary. She was so used to people filling every empty space with noise.

At the second venue, a garden space in Ikoyi with bougainvillea climbing the left wall and soft afternoon light coming through the trees, she stopped walking.

“This one,” she said. Not to anyone in particular.

Tobi looked around. “What about it?”

“It feels like somewhere you’d actually want to be. The first one felt like a conference.”

He was quiet for a moment, considering it seriously the way she had noticed he considered things. “The ceiling in the first one,” he said. “Too corporate. This one breathes.”

She looked at him. “You’re an architect.”

“Guilty.”

“So you actually know what you’re talking about.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. “Most of the time.”

The coordinator drifted toward a couple at the far end of the garden, leaving them briefly alone. Nneka walked toward the bougainvillea wall and touched one of the flowers without thinking, the way you touch things that are beautiful and real.

“Can I ask you something?” Tobi said behind her.

She turned. “Okay.”

“Do you actually like any of this? The planning. The venues. All of it.”

The question landed somewhere unexpected. Nobody had asked her that. Not her mother, not Somto, not Damilare. They had all asked if she was excited, if she was happy, if she had decided on the flowers yet. Not whether she liked it.

“I like the idea of being married,” she said carefully. “The planning feels like something to survive.”

He nodded like that was a complete and reasonable answer. Like he was not going to push it further or tell her she should be enjoying every moment.

She appreciated that more than she could explain.

They spent another twenty minutes in the garden. He told her about a building he had worked on in VI that used similar light principles, the way good design made people feel held without knowing why. She told him about her job, brand strategy, the way companies spent millions telling people who they were instead of just being it. He laughed at that, a real laugh, surprised out of him.

In the car park afterward she pulled up the photos to send to Damilare.

“Tell him the second one,” Tobi said.

“I will.”

A brief silence. The afternoon light was going golden around them.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know,” he said simply.

She drove home thinking about the bougainvillea and the way the garden breathed and the fact that for two hours she had not once thought about a name on a phone screen.

She noticed that she had not thought about it.

Then she noticed that she was noticing.

To be continued…