EPISODE 5 (FINALE)
I did not reply to Damilare’s message for three full days.
I carried it with me everywhere, reading it in quiet moments, in the bathroom at work, in bed beside a photograph of a husband who trusted me completely, turning over every possible version of what my life could become depending on what I did next.
On the fourth day, I finally called him.
“We can’t keep doing this,” I said, before he could even say hello properly. “Not the affair, that ended the day you moved out, and God knows we both meant it. I mean this. The messages. The checking in. Whatever this quiet thread between us still is, pretending to be nothing while clearly still being something.”
He was silent for a long moment. “You’re right,” he finally said. “I know you’re right. I think some part of me has just been waiting for permission to let go completely, and I suppose I was hoping you’d give me a reason not to.”
“I can’t give you that reason, Damilare. I have to give my marriage an honest chance, whatever that ends up looking like. Tobi is coming home permanently. He wants to build a family with me. I owe him the version of myself that actually chooses him, fully, not the version still holding onto something with his brother in the background.”
“And if you can’t fully choose him? If some part of what happened between us doesn’t just disappear because you’ve decided it should?”
That question sat heavily between us, because I did not have an honest answer to it, not one I was ready to say out loud to either of us.
“Then I’ll carry that quietly,” I said finally, “the way people carry things they’ve decided not to destroy other people’s lives over. But I have to try, Damilare. I have to at least try to build the marriage I promised Tobi, before I decide it’s not possible.”
We did not speak again after that call.
Tobi returned home permanently six weeks later, exactly as planned, and true to what I had told his brother, I threw myself completely into rebuilding what those five months of guilt-soaked distraction had quietly eroded. I was patient with him. Present with him. I learned to sit with the discomfort of loving someone honestly again after months of loving someone else in secret.
We are expecting our first child now, seven months into Tobi’s permanent return home.
Damilare graduated from his program eventually, moved to a different city entirely for work, a decision I have always suspected was at least partly about putting sufficient distance between himself and a house that held five months he has likely spent every day since trying to forgive himself for. We see him occasionally now, at family functions, careful, polite, brotherly in front of everyone, exactly the way we agreed things needed to be, though there are moments, brief ones, when our eyes meet across a room and something unspoken passes between us that neither of us will ever have the courage to name out loud again.
Tobi still has no idea.
I have gone back and forth more times than I can count over these past two years about whether he deserves to know, whether carrying this secret quietly for the rest of our marriage is an act of protection or simply another, more permanent form of the same selfishness that started this entire thing on a lonely birthday night eighteen months ago.
I have not decided yet.
Some nights, watching him sleep beside me, one hand resting protectively over my growing belly, I convince myself the kindest thing I can ever do for this man is let this secret die quietly with the two people who created it.
Other nights, I am not so certain honesty and kindness are supposed to be the same thing at all.
THE END.
#story #storytelling #forbidden
© Rayowrites
