The Love That Broke You

She leans across the table as if she owns the light. From her bag she takes a tube of lip gloss and paints his mouth with a slow, deliberate tenderness. Then she proceeds to kiss him. He lets her, playing shy at first, then answering when she continues, he responds greedily. She wipes the shine from his lips with one finger and laughs like it is a private triumph.

“She’s a bold one”, you thought.

You sip your Arab tea and watch the small ritual through a net of memory. They look like a pair from a film: reckless, gleaming, unbothered by the room. Warmth rises in you for the brief, treacherous second that memory allows, and you reminisce the old sweetness of early years with Femi. Then it curdles into something you cannot swallow.

Femi’s love was always a parade. A public religion. Like this girl, he would steal kisses and even much more wherever, whenever.

He loved as if the world were an audience and his gestures were performances meant to silence gossip and feed his image. He gave loudly too, gifts that came wrapped in louder intentions, trips arranged like proofs, declarations that made you the admired woman at every table.

If you weren’t you, you might have envied the woman on his arm. Femi, the answer to many a girl’s prayers, was yours, to have, to hold, to build a life with.

So when he asked to marry you, you laughed hard and long.

“Are you crazy?” you asked. “Will I marry you?”

“Of course, who would you leave me for?”

He laughed out loud too and slid the ring onto your finger as if his fingers had tucked you into a story where everything would be bright.

You knew he was not faithful. You had no proof but you knew, because his reputation preceded him. Everyone thought you were the magic, the one who tamed him, but you knew it was not true. You knew the man had not changed. You were the prize - one he was so focused on bagging and keeping, but you knew it was only a matter of time before his nature betrayed him.

You married him anyway because love, in its stubborn generosity, makes fools of people. Your love for him was unconditional, really. Even if all Femi had was a shirt and a rented room to sleep in, you would have married him. It didn’t make sense, but you knew. Fortunately, you never got the opportunity to prove that because Femi’s shirts spoke loudly of his luxurious taste and his homes came with addresses in different continents.

Twelve years pass, giving you four children: Boluwatife, the son who opened your womb and never let you forget it; bubbly Feranmi, your baby boy who is always cheerful with his loud laughter; Kayinsola, the son who mirrored your own face, like a male version of you; and Arike, your baby girl and the miracle you prayed for.

Twelve years later, you sit here nursing your cup of Arab tea, watching the young couple who remind you of your intense romance with Femi all those years ago. But the only thought on your mind is how best to kill Femi with no trace to you.

You considered what women in stories did when men betrayed them. Did they try poison and slow justice? Did they get hired hands? Involved themselves in clandestine transactions? You mused about the options but each felt obscene in its own way, and you recoiled because any of these would require your hands to be anything but clean. Yet the hunger for recompense grew teeth. The only thing that seemed to make sense was to ensure that his comfortable future would not be had at your expense and at the expense of the women he had torn into his life.

This had become your only concern for weeks.

Five days ago, at a business lunch, you met Jude, a 34-year-old who had just started a recycling business. He had come hoping to pitch to you, having heard you were the key to funding. You didn’t care about his business but as he spoke, you heard what you wanted - a man who could act without asking questions. You promised him five hundred million naira, not for his pitch but for a job you didn’t name. He understood, his nod was sharp, his eyes holding a flicker of his own ghosts. “I’ve fixed wrongs before, treated fuck ups” he said, voice low. You didn’t ask what he meant. Wanting something can be the beginning of many sins.

You thought nothing more of Jude, not consciously anyway, until days later, at the 40th marriage anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Udechukwu. Femi whispered how he looked forward to having your celebration. “What if you are not here then?” you asked, and he unsuspectingly joked about how he had no intentions of relocating outside Nigeria. Vacations would always be in any part of the world he desired, but Nigeria would always be his home.

You sighed as you watched your handsome idiot of a husband. You held yourself back but the hate tasted bitter in your gut.

That night, as you tucked Arike into bed, her small hand curled around yours, you faltered. You imagined her growing up without a father, Boluwatife’s fierce questions turning to grief, Feranmi’s laughter dimming. Kayinsola’s hero suddenly gone. Could you do this? Could you take their father, flawed as he was, and leave them to carry the weight? The thought clawed at you, but then you remembered Morayo’s face, the clinic notes, the life Femi built on your trust. The hate roared back, louder than guilt.

The hate had consumed you. You wanted revenge and the only compensation would be Femi’s blood; his life was the only ransom that could compensate for what he did to you.

The thing is that the rot in your marriage did not announce itself with a single scandal. The hate for Femi first started when you found out two months after your wedding that he had reconnected with an ex-girlfriend of his.

Morayo, the exotic beauty he dated and broke up with a year before he met you. Morayo is biracial; her fair skin glowed and her face was the kind you never forget - the kind of woman you look at and agree it probably would not be fair for one man to have her. They hooked up again two months after your wedding, and Femi even invited her to your home while you were away for your master’s abroad.

It was not just Morayo though, there were others too, names that came and went like rumors, faces that blurred together.

You bore all that, but what broke you was learning that he didn’t just get back with Morayo but impregnated her, paid her bride price secretly, and relocated her to Madrid, Spain.

It was Urenna who first asked what you planned to do with your co-wife. You were taken aback at first as you had no idea. She apologized and said she thought you knew because it was no longer news. You pieced the rest together through humiliating fragments: a blog post about a wedding you didn’t attend, whispers at a cousin’s party, a photo of Morayo’s glowing smile on a friend’s phone. You didn’t confront Femi. Confrontation would mean admitting the illusion you’d built was glass. He had, however, broken something in you that could never be fixed.

Six months ago, Olotuche, your cousin, an obstetrician in Spain, sent a message about discussing something urgent with you. You were worried but didn’t know what to expect.

She asked to call when you were not in the house for your conversation. And when you spoke later, she told you she consulted with Morayo at the hospital. She was her patient. She was pregnant with a second child and was on ARVs as she was living with HIV. She came on one of her antenatal visits with her husband who turned out to be Femi - your husband.

Olotuche said she was taken aback but had to keep her cool as they were her patients. Femi stayed back after their consultation to ask her not to tell you, as this was a secret. He too was living with HIV but didn’t know how to tell you. Olotuche asked if he knew he was putting your life and kids at risk, but he said he didn’t know how to handle it. She had advised him to open up to you.

You went for a test the next day. The result was clinical in its cruelty. You tested positive for HIV, and it had advanced. The words the nurses used wrapped around you, but each sterile instruction could not mend the hollow betrayal had made.

You began treatment immediately and adhered religiously, but Femi never said a word. So imagine the rage that welled when he had the audacity to muse about your 40th anniversary at the Udechukwus’ celebration.

What anniversary? The one where he’d have killed you and moved on with Morayo?

You wonder why Femi would do this to you. The man you loved had broken you, and that love became a small animal that fed on rage. You began to learn that hate is not a sudden roar—it is not always loud but sometimes slow and methodical. You learned the architecture of his days, which restaurants he favored, the names he used, the way he moved in rooms, and you began to imagine ways to make him answer, publicly, for the life he had divided between people and places.

You sit now and nurse the Arab tea, waiting for Jude; you had let him know the conditions for accessing the funds. He would kill Femi.

First though, you planned a public humiliation for his perfect image. You sent documents like seed - his messages to and from Morayo, clinic notes from her antenatal visits, the faint trail of flights that traced a life you had paid for in trust. You sent them to a journalist. The story landed like a stone in water. It rippled.

The first headline felt like lightning: Lagos Tycoon’s Secret Second Wife Exposed.

Friends who had toasted your marriage looked foolish. Those who looked up to Femi now looked away. He called you that morning, speaking fast as though he had urgent things to say. He began with apologies that sounded like rehearsed speech. He begged to come home. His voice sounded so small and thin it was almost unrecognizable. You could have forgiven him there; perhaps in another life you would have. But you had the names and the dates; you had been the one who kept the children awake at night, and you could not let him slide back into being beloved for the ease of his mouth.

Once public exposure arrived, it did not feel like finality. The world has a way of moving on. Scandal is a bright stain that often fades when new bright stains arrive. You wanted more than ruin of reputation. You wanted him to lose the steady, untroubled life he’d built on other people’s bodies. You wanted a consequence that could not be smoothed away with charm. You gave Jude the nod and let an inevitable thing become more inevitable.

Then the waiting began. Hate taught you patience. You moved through your days with your usual routine - school runs, homework, meal preps. You set your face in the mornings like a modest shield. At night you stayed awake with thoughts, rehearsing the scene when truth arrived.

Yesterday, you saw Morayo’s face again, not in person, but in a photo Urenna forwarded, a screenshot from a gossip blog. Morayo, radiant in Madrid, her second child in her arms, Femi beside her. The caption speculated about your silence. You stared at her face, wondering if she knew the cost of her life was your life. Did she know he’d broken you? Did she care? The photo was a knife, twisting the hate tighter. You forwarded it to the journalist, another seed.

The message came on an ordinary night as you explained to Kayinsola the difference between alumni and alma mater. The boy never seemed to stop with questions you had no idea about when you were his age. Done, the message read. You had never wanted to know the how; you only needed the fact.

Hours later, sirens blared outside your home. Police swarmed, their voices official, their hands full of forms. A body, somewhere. Jude was a rumor now, a name in someone else’s file. The world turned its forensic eye on what had been invisible.

You stand now in your bedroom, the house quiet except for the hum of Lagos outside. You pack a single suitcase with your children’s photos, Arike’s favorite blanket, your treatment pills. The weight of what you’ve done sits in your bones, not heavy but steady, like a truth you’ve finally named.

The faint scent of lip gloss rises unbidden, mocking, lingering, as you reach for the doorknob. The city glitters beyond your window, indifferent, as you step toward whatever comes next.

Trying Another Leg

The day you got married began exactly as you had imagined.

A house filled with relatives who had come from far and near to celebrate with you. Aunties you hadn’t seen in years, cousins you had spoken to via WhatsApp call for the longest time and those whose faces you only knew from WhatsApp display pictures, laughter spilling from the kitchen like smoke from a fire. Yoma, your older brother, the Pediatrician from British Columbia, came with his wife and their twin boys, proudly showing them off in matching agbadas. Rukky, your younger sister - the loud, outspoken banker from Port Harcourt who never had time for anyone managed to steal a weekend from her busy life to share your special day with you. She had been married for two years and had a son.

“You better not cry when he’s reading his vows,” she teased. “All your makeup will waste.”

You didn’t care. You were already smiling wider than you ever had. Even your makeup artist shook her head and said, “Ahn ahn, Voke, see as you dey shine like woman wey just receive miracle alert.”

You laughed and told her, “Na love, my sister. Na pure love.”

And it was. You had always been a hopeless romantic and countless heartbreaks didn’t take that away. You believed in love the way people believed in answered prayers - completely, foolishly, without question. And when it finally happened with Osahon, you felt the thing you had only read about and watched in movies. You could finally put a name to the feeling - love. Pure, undiluted, the kind that answers the puzzles of the heart, that gives without expecting, that esteems the other above itself. 

Osahon came into your life at a time that seemed like God’s own timing.

You still remember the way he looked at you that day, eyes shining, voice trembling as he said his vows. You didn’t hear everything, not really. You were too busy imagining the future you thought you were stepping into. The laughter, the Sunday lunches, the lazy mornings with gospel music playing softly in the background, the home filled with children’s laughter and tiny feet

You danced to J Holiday’s Forever Ain’t Enough at the wedding reception, and when he whispered “forever” in your ear, you believed him. You were now one ‘Mr and Mrs Osaigbovo’.

Iye, his mother, hugged you after the ceremony, her beads pressing against your arm.

“My daughter,” she said with that proud, gap-toothed smile, “you have brought joy into this family. God bless your womb with sons and daughters.”

Everyone shouted, “Amen!”

You blushed, already dreaming of small hands, of soft cries in the night, of a home filled with life.

It’s funny now, how dreams have their own kind of blindness.

The first two years were good, sweet even. You were the kind of couple people used as examples. “See Osahon and Voke, that’s how marriage should be.” You prayed together, danced at every wedding, shared secrets in whispers late into the night. Life was kind, and love, steady.

Then the waiting began.

At first, it was just months slipping by. You didn’t count, because faith doesn’t count. But faith, you would learn, has an expiry date when pain lingers too long.

But one year became two. Two became three.

Your menstrual flow soon became like an unwanted visitor, stubborn, unperturbed, yet unwanted. Each month, each stain, each cramp a reminder of the thing that hadn’t come. A reminder of the silence in your flat, the kind that echoes back your own laughter. A reminder of the echoes of just your voices when there should have been another, softer, shriller. A baby’s. 

A reminder that the only sound in your home had become the hum of the fridge and Osahon’s sighs when he thought you were asleep.

You would see women complain about losing their figure after childbirth and wonder if they knew what a blessing it was to have a body stretched, scarred, reshaped by the miracle of carrying life. You would have traded your perfect flat stomach for a map of stretch marks any day.

Yoma’s wife had even given birth to another son. You saw the photos on the family group chat—tiny fingers curled around Yoma’s thumb, his wife glowing in her hospital gown. Everyone sent congratulatory messages. You sent yours too, adding emojis you didn’t mean, smiling through the tightening in your chest.

You tried to pray. God, you tried. Every night on your knees beside Osahon, the words came half-believing, half-begging. “Father Lord, remember me.” Sometimes, you would open your eyes mid-prayer and watch Osahon, head bowed, his voice low. You wondered what he said to God when you weren’t listening. Did he blame you in his prayers? Did he ask to be delivered from you?

You began to hate the pity. The soft looks from your mother, the careless comments from aunties who meant well. “It will happen soon, just relax, don’t think about it.” How do you not think about something that sits in your womb like silence?

At first, Iye still called every other week. Then the prayers started. Then the advice. Then the oils and the fasting.

“Maybe it’s spiritual,” she said once, her eyes narrowing. “I know one man of God in Auchi. He prayed for one woman, two months later she gave birth to twins.”

You nodded politely, even though you’d already seen three pastors and a prophetess who’d made you drink anointed water that tasted like battery acid.

Still, you tried. You both did. Hospitals in Wuse, specialists in Maitama, a discreet fertility clinic in Lagos. The tests all said the same thing, you were both fine.

“Fine,” you repeated to yourself one night, staring at the ceiling. “Then where is the child?”

Nine years had passed. Your friends’ children started calling you Aunty Voke, and the word began to sound like an insult.

Then the whispers began. They never said it to your face, but you heard enough. His mother’s voice over the phone, hushed but sharp, “Osahon, a man cannot waste his seed forever. Try another leg. Just to know where the problem is.”

Osahon changed slowly. First, it was the small things - fewer jokes, shorter prayers, longer hours at work. He began staying out late, saying things like, “Traffic was mad,” or “Client meeting ran long.” You didn’t ask too many questions because you were afraid of the answers.

Weeks later, you overheard Iye again, her voice sharp through the phone. “Osahon, time is not waiting. Love is good, but a man needs children to carry the family name. Even Abraham took Hagar, it’s not sin if it’s for the family.”

You froze in the kitchen, palm over your mouth. Try another leg.

That phrase would sit in your stomach like a stone.

Osahon didn’t mention the call, but the silence between you grew roots. He tried to defend you, at least at first. He would hold you and say, “Don’t mind them. You are my wife, my blessing.” But with time, even his comfort started to sound rehearsed like a script he was tired of performing.

You remember the night everything changed. He came home late, smelling faintly of perfume that wasn’t yours. He sat at the edge of the bed, his voice calm, too calm.

“Voke, I’ve been thinking,” he began. “Maybe I should take another wife. I’m not getting younger.”

You froze. The air between you felt heavy.

“Are you saying I’m getting younger?” you asked, your voice breaking before you could stop it.

He looked at you then, your husband, the same man who had danced barefoot with you at your wedding reception, the man who once kissed your hands after morning prayers.

The same Osahon who would shout “don’t tell me, it’s not worth dying for” as he sang Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do” off-key in the kitchen, wielding a wooden spoon like a microphone, his eyes bright with mischief. The same man who knew your love for thick, spicy egusi with dry fish, not stockfish, and surprised you with smoothies and juice from the vendors at Jabi Lake Park.

That man, the one who made your friends jealous with the way he looked at you like you were a miracle, now sat on your bed saying he wanted another wife. His silence was a verdict.

You didn’t cry immediately. You just sat there, numb, staring at the man you once called your answered prayer, realizing that some prayers come disguised as tests.

You told Lota, your closest friend, about it the next day, your voice trembling between anger and disbelief. She was the one friend who had seen you through the ache of those waiting years, through the awkward doctor visits and the endless prayers from well-meaning aunties.

“I told you,” she said, her tone soft but carrying that familiar I-know-life sting. “Men don’t wait forever. You better find a way to hold your home.”

“My dear, I no go lie for you, these men, their patience get expiry date o. If you want to keep your home, do something. Anything.”

“Do something like what?” you asked, almost laughing.

She looked at you for a long moment and said quietly, “You get sense. You go know wetin to do.”

You laughed then, but her words stayed, like a seed buried deep.

And when love stopped being enough, when silence became the language of your home, you started thinking, really thinking of what it meant to save your marriage and hold your home.

You laughed bitterly. Hold your home. As though a home were a door about to fall off its hinges. As though love, trust, and years of shared laughter could be held together with masking tape and Sunday prayers.

Still, her words followed you around the house that night. They clung to you as you folded Osahon’s shirts, the expensive ones from London that he now wore to impress someone else. You looked at your reflection in the mirror, your still-flat stomach, the faint lines under your eyes and wondered when exactly the world decided that your worth ended with your womb.

Rukky gave birth to another baby, a girl and photos flooded the family group chat, the baby swaddled in pink, and your mother’s excited voice note came next:

“See how God is blessing my children. Soon it will be your turn.”

You muted the chat.

When you prayed that night, you didn’t know if you were praying to be comforted, or to be vindicated.

Osahon had finally stopped coming home early. He didn’t even bother with the blame game anymore. Sometimes he mumbled excuses that you couldn’t hear, about clients who needed “urgent asset restructuring.” You didn’t need to ask who the client was.

Lota’s words returned, heavier now: find a way to hold your home.

So when Alfred, your PA, always ready with a “Yes Ma” started spending more hours at your office, helping with suppliers, answering your phone when you couldn’t bear to talk, you didn’t stop him. He was quiet, attentive, kind in the unassuming way that doesn’t ask for anything in return. He would look at you sometimes as though you were not the woman everyone pitied, but someone worth listening to.

The first time it happened, you didn’t plan it. You were crying in your office, invoices scattered like accusations, when Alfred walked in without knocking. 

He stood there, awkward, his usual “Yes Ma” replaced by a quiet, “Madam, you don’t deserve this.” You knew little about him, only that he sent most of his salary to his mother in Warri, that his eyes softened when he spoke of her. 

When he moved closer to comfort you, his hand brushing yours, the loneliness in you made the decision, pulling you toward the warmth of someone who saw you, not your empty womb. You felt that small touch like fire. You told yourself it was nothing, that it was loneliness playing tricks on you.

The first kiss came weeks later, unplanned and undesired, at least in the way people claim sin sneaks up on them.

But one evening, a week after that kiss & having had one glass of red wine too many, one tear too heavy, and one hand too close, it happened. You hated yourself afterwards, but the guilt was strangely soft, the kind that doesn’t hurt enough to stop you from doing it again. 

So it happened again.

Weeks later, you missed your period.

You stared at the pregnancy test in the bathroom, trembling. The two lines stared back at you like an accusation and a miracle in one breath.

You cried. Not out of shame, but relief. Relief that your body still worked. That you could finally be called Mama something. That the world would no longer look at you with pity.

By then, Osahon had begun his own affair. A banker from his office, you heard. You found her name on his phone once, “Adaobi Bank.” You saw the messages. The subtle perfume on his shirt. You didn’t fight him. You even smiled when he repeated again, “Voke, maybe… maybe I should consider taking another wife for the sake of the family name.”

“Why not?” you said, your voice steady. “You’re not getting younger.”

He looked startled. You smiled wider. “At least we’ll both have peace.” “Do whatever you think is best,” you said quietly.

He mistook your calm for surrender. He didn’t know it was mercy.

That night, you decided to tell him about Alfred. But not the truth. The truth was too fragile, too dangerous. You told him Alfred had been making advances at you, that you felt uncomfortable. He even tried to kiss you once. Osahon’s eyes darkened immediately. 

“He did what?”

You didn’t plan for what happened next. Osahon stormed out that morning, his anger a live wire, and you let him go, thinking it would end with threats, maybe a payoff to keep Alfred quiet. You however wondered how a man who had declared his intention to marry another woman could be so jealous at the thought of his wife being desired by another man.

But hours later, your phone rang. It was Lota, her voice shaking. “Voke, there was a fight. Alfred… he’s gone.” She said Osahon had confronted him in the office, voices rising, blows from Osahon to Alfred, a hard shove, then Alfred’s head hitting the wall. The blood pooled too fast, they said, before the ambulance could save him. You stood frozen in the kitchen, the phone slipping from your hand. You’d wanted Alfred gone, yes, but not like this. Guilt clawed at you, sharp and unfamiliar, yet beneath it, a shameful flicker of relief - you were free of him, and your secret was safe.

The police called it manslaughter. The court called it self-defense. The story fit well enough, and money smoothened the rough edges. He got a few years.

A visit to the gynecologist months later, showed that you were having twins. You laughed when the doctor told you, a half-broken, half-ecstatic laugh that startled even you.

The doctor’s words still echo in your mind: “Mrs. Osaigbovo, congratulations, you’re expecting twins.”

You laughed until you cried. It wasn’t joy. It was something deeper, rawer, darker. The kind of laughter that sounds like a prayer and a curse all at once.

At night, you tried to pray, but the words felt like stones in your mouth. You’d once believed God heard every whispered plea, every tear-soaked “Father Lord, remember me.” But now, with Alfred gone and your womb finally full, you wondered if God had turned His face away or if you’d pushed Him away first. 

The twins were a miracle, yes, but one you’d carved out of sin and blood. You didn’t know if you were praying for forgiveness or permission to keep going.

You went into labour alone and when your twins were born - a boy and a girl, you named them Efe and Ese, because they were your laughter and your blessing. 

Your mom and Iye both danced and sang about how their enemies had finally been put to shame. People said God had finally remembered you. That delay was not denial. That your faith had been rewarded.

You smiled. You even said “To God be the glory.”

At night, when the house is quiet and Efe and Ese’s soft breaths fill the room, you whisper into the darkness, “I’m sorry.” 

To Alfred, whose blood stains your miracle. To God, whose face you can no longer seek. To the woman you were, who believed love was enough. 

Because you know the truth. You didn’t just take fate into your hands. You twisted it until it bled, and that blood watered the seed of your children.