“Yes,” he says. “It was cowardice too.”
The honesty lands harder than excuses would have.
He steps closer, but not too close. “I need you to understand one thing. When I said you’re more beautiful than I imagined, I did not mean despite the scars. I meant exactly as you are. I saw your face, and I thought: all this time, she believed she was carrying shame when she was carrying evidence of survival. I did not tell you because I knew the minute sight entered our relationship, you would think I had joined the rest of the world in judging you. I wanted one more day before that happened. Then another. Then another.”
You lean back against the sink.
“And now?”
“Now I’ve told you because I couldn’t begin a marriage by lying in the dark while pretending it was tenderness.”
You stare at him.
The cruelest thing about truth is that it can arrive late and still be true.
You spend the rest of the night on the couch.
He does not ask you to stay. He brings you a blanket and a glass of water and leaves both on the coffee table like offerings at an altar that may or may not accept them. In the bedroom, you hear him moving once, twice, then not at all. Sleep never comes for you. Only memory.
You remember your mother after the fire, sitting on the edge of your hospital bed with her purse in her lap and exhaustion stitched into every line of her face. She had worked as a cleaner in three offices, knees swollen, wrists always aching, yet when your despair turned ugly, she met it with the patience of saints and women who know sainthood is just another unpaid labor. “Anybody can love what is easy to look at,” she once told you while helping change your dressings. “That is not character. That is eyesight.”
At the time, you had almost laughed.
Now, at four in the morning, the sentence returns like a hand at your shoulder.
By dawn, your decision is not dramatic. It is tired.
You pack a small bag.
When Obinna comes out of the bedroom, he has the look of a man who has not slept either. The early light catches his face in a way that makes him look younger and more breakable than he did last night. You resent that softness in him because you feel none in yourself.
“I’m going to my mother’s,” you say.
He nods. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to explain anything to her?”
“She already thinks men are a disappointing species. You’d only be confirming her research.”
A ghost of a smile touches his mouth and disappears. At least he knows not to ask whether you’re joking.
He walks you to the door anyway. At the threshold, he says, “Eden… Adaeze… whichever name you want from me, I will use.”
You look at him for a long moment.
“My own,” you say at last. “Use my own.”
His eyes lower. “Adaeze.”
The sound of it hurts more than expected. Not because it is wrong. Because it is right.
Leave a Comment