Before I decided to throw my marriage into the boondocks, everything was going well.
I lacked nothing. I did not have to work. It was an option, not a necessity. I had pocket money, lavish vacations, luxury goods in my closet valued at the price of a full boutique. I got regular sex, great foot rubs and massages. I could be described as one of the few women who found a husband on a platter of gold.
The only pending question in my head was one I carried into the marriage quietly, like contraband. Did I deserve him?
Yemi had the opportunity to marry someone else. Rita was a Kalabari girl his parents had already approved. I saw her once at a wedding. Fair-skinned, long thick type 4C hair, a medical doctor practicing at a private hospital. The full package. His parents wanted her. Yemi did not. He chose me instead, much to their dismay. Rita moved on without a fight. No drama. No confrontation. She simply stepped aside like a woman who had other options, which she did.
Yemi and I got married three years later. I told myself I had stopped asking the question.
I had not.
The look on his face as he stood in that doorway broke my heart in a way I had not prepared for.
I had imagined this moment before, in the abstract way you imagine disasters before they arrive. A discovery. An explanation. A negotiation. What I had not imagined was his face. The specific configuration of anger and betrayal that only appears when the person standing in front of you is someone who trusted you completely. He recognised Osas immediately. Of course he did. Yemi had always been perceptive about the things he chose not to say out loud.
I pulled away from Osas and grabbed the bedsheet. Wrapped it around my body. The gesture was useless. He had already seen everything.
"Rose."
One word. My name. But he said it the way you say something you cannot believe you are being forced to say.
Osas slid off the bed. Guilt was written across his face in large capital letters. He was already looking for his clothes, already trying to make himself small enough to disappear. We had not planned for Yemi to come home early. We had not planned for a lot of things.
"How long have you two been doing this?"
"My husband was good to me. And I had thrown it away for twenty minutes and an orgasm. Osas was not even worth running home to."
I looked away. Shame moved through me like something physical. My husband was genuinely, consistently, unremarkably good to me in all the ways that matter. And I had thrown it away for twenty minutes and an orgasm. Osas was not even worth running home to. He was not the point. He had never been the point.
The point was the question I had carried into the marriage and never answered.
"RoseofSharon." Full name now. He only used it when something was finished. "How long has this affair been going on?"
I felt the lump form in my throat. Tears were already moving without my permission.
Yemi shook his head. When he spoke again his voice had shifted from angry into something quieter and worse.
"I cannot believe you had the nerve to bring him into our bed. Not a hotel. Not somewhere else. Our bed. Are you possessed by something?"
Thinking about it later, maybe I was. Because there was no rational explanation for the choices I had made, stacked one on top of another over months, leading to this specific moment in this specific room. It did not make an iota of sense.
He turned and walked out without another word.
Not a door slam. Not a thrown object. Just the sound of his footsteps retreating down the hall, which was somehow the loudest sound I had ever heard.
I fell on my knees. The bedsheet pooled around me on the floor. I wept the way you weep when you know there is no version of what happens next that looks like before.
Osas was still standing there, frozen, an expression on his face somewhere between guilt and the practical urgency of a man who needed to leave.
"Get out of my house right now," I said. "Before I kill you."
He knew I meant it. He put his clothes on and ran.