# My Brother’s Best Friend
## Episode 6
“It’s exactly what you think it is,” I said, deciding that continued delicacy would only prolong an inevitably difficult conversation. “Damilare and I have feelings for each other. We wanted you to hear it from us directly, not discover it on your own.”
Chibuike stood very still for a long moment, processing, his eyes moving between the two of us with an expression I could not fully read, somewhere between hurt and genuine confusion.
“Twelve years,” he finally said, his voice quiet in a way that felt considerably more unsettling than if he had simply raised it. “Twelve years, Damilare, and you couldn’t wait even one month before pursuing something with my sister, while she’s still processing a broken engagement, while she’s living under my roof specifically because she needed somewhere safe to fall apart?”
“Chibuike,” Damilare started, “it wasn’t like that. I didn’t pursue anything. It developed naturally, and we’ve both been careful about the timing, given everything Amara is navigating.”
“Careful,” Chibuike repeated, an edge entering his voice now. “You call this careful? My best friend developing feelings for my sister while she’s staying in our flat recovering from heartbreak, and neither of you thought to mention it until it had already progressed far enough that you’re sitting here announcing it as an established fact rather than asking whether it was even appropriate to pursue in the first place?”
I felt the fairness in his anger even as it stung, understanding that from his position, watching two people he loved navigate something this significant without his knowledge, however brief that window of secrecy had actually been, genuinely warranted the frustration he was expressing.
“You’re right that we should have told you sooner,” I said. “We told you within days of actually acknowledging it to each other, Chibuike, not months. I understand this feels sudden from where you’re standing, but it hasn’t been sudden from where we’re standing.”
My brother turned to look at me directly, and something in his expression softened slightly, though the tension in his shoulders remained.
“Amara, I need you to actually hear this, not just wait for me to finish talking so you can defend the relationship further. Three weeks ago, you were engaged to be married. Three weeks. I am not questioning whether Damilare is a good man, because I know he is, better than almost anyone else I know. I am questioning whether you are actually in a position, emotionally, to know the difference right now between genuine feelings and simply needing somewhere safe to land after everything fell apart.”
The question landed harder than I wanted to admit, precisely because I had wrestled with some version of it myself during those quiet, uncertain nights before finally admitting my feelings to Damilare directly.
“I’ve asked myself that same question,” I said honestly. “More than once. But Chibuike, I know the difference between needing comfort and genuinely wanting someone. What I feel for Damilare isn’t about escaping what happened with Chuka. It exists entirely separate from that.”
Chibuike studied me for a long moment, then turned back to Damilare, his expression hardening again.
“I need space from both of you right now,” he said finally. “Not permanently. I just need to actually process this instead of standing here reacting to it in real time.”
He picked his bag back up and left the flat without another word, the door closing behind him with a controlled, deliberate quietness that somehow felt more unsettling than if he had slammed it.
Damilare and I sat in the silence he left behind, both of us absorbing the weight of a conversation that had gone considerably worse than either of us had hoped, however realistically we might have anticipated some version of exactly this reaction.
“He’ll come around,” Damilare said, though his voice carried less certainty than I wanted to hear.
“Will he?” I asked. “Because right now, I’m genuinely not sure, and I don’t know what happens to any of this, between us, between you and him, if he doesn’t.”
Three days passed before Chibuike returned to the flat, having apparently stayed with a colleague during that time, and when he finally walked back through the door, his expression carried something more settled than the raw anger of that first confrontation, though clearly still unresolved.
He sat down across from both of us at the same dining table where everything had unraveled days earlier, and said something that surprised me with how carefully, deliberately fair it turned out to be.
What do you think it would take, after a confrontation like that, for genuine trust to rebuild between all three of them?
@Rayowrites
