EPISODE 2
I lay in bed that night with my heart pounding so loudly I was certain the whole house could hear it, staring at the ceiling, listening to every small sound from down the hallway, Damilare’s footsteps, the soft click of his own door, water running briefly in the bathroom, then silence.
Nothing happened.
He did not come.
I lay awake for almost two hours, oscillating between relief and something that felt uncomfortably close to disappointment, before exhaustion finally pulled me under.
I woke the next morning consumed with a shame so heavy I could barely look at myself in the mirror. What was I doing? What kind of woman leaves her bedroom door unlocked for her husband’s younger brother while that same husband is thousands of miles away, working himself exhausted to build a life for the both of us?
I locked the door that night. And the next. And the one after that.
I threw myself into work, into calls with Tobi that I made sure to initiate rather than wait for, into rebuilding the version of myself that existed before that birthday night cracked something open in me I hadn’t known was fragile.
Damilare, for his part, never mentioned the unlocked door, never brought it up, never once acted as though he had even noticed. Perhaps he genuinely hadn’t. Perhaps I had imagined the whole significance of that small, reckless act into something far larger than it deserved to be.
For nearly two months, things returned to something resembling normal. We still sat together in the evenings, still watched films, still argued lightly about football, but I kept a careful, deliberate distance now, choosing my words more cautiously, avoiding the long conversations that stretched past midnight, avoiding, most of all, the particular way he sometimes looked at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.
Then Tobi’s calls stopped almost entirely for eleven straight days.
I told myself it was work. A project deadline, a difficult client, the usual explanations that had covered every previous gap in communication. But eleven days of near silence from a man who used to call me twice daily in our first year of marriage did something to the fragile equilibrium I had spent two months rebuilding.
On the twelfth night, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table again, this time not crying, just staring blankly at my phone, willing it to ring.
Damilare sat down across from me without a word, the way he had that first birthday night, and simply waited.
“He hasn’t called in almost two weeks,” I finally said, my voice smaller than I intended.
“Have you tried calling him?”
“Every day. It goes to voicemail. Or he texts back one line, ‘busy, will call soon,’ and then nothing.”
Damilare was quiet for a long moment, his jaw tight in a way I hadn’t seen before, something protective and angry moving behind his eyes.
“That’s not okay,” he said finally. “Whatever is happening on his end, whatever pressure he’s under, that doesn’t give him the right to leave you sitting here wondering if you still matter to him. You didn’t sign up to be married to a ghost.”
Nobody had said anything like that to me in months. Everyone around me, my mother, my friends, even my own internal voice, had spent the better part of two years telling me to be patient, to be understanding, to remember the sacrifice Tobi was making for our future.
Nobody had ever simply said: you deserve better than this silence.
I don’t remember which one of us moved first.
I only remember that somewhere between his hand reaching across the table to cover mine, and the words “you deserve better than this” still hanging in the air between us, the careful distance I had spent two months building collapsed entirely, and I found myself standing, walking around that table, and kissing my husband’s brother in the kitchen of the house my husband was working himself into the ground to provide for.
Damilare pulled back first, his breathing unsteady, his eyes wide with something between want and horror.
“Sister, we can’t—”
“Don’t call me that,” I said quietly, surprising myself with how steady my voice sounded despite everything shaking inside me. “Not tonight. Please. Just for tonight, don’t call me that.”
He looked at me for a long, agonizing moment, torn between every loyalty he had ever owed his brother and something that had clearly been building in him far longer than I had ever allowed myself to notice.
Then he made a choice that would change everything between the three of us permanently.
Title: What the Distance Made Me Do
#story #storytelling #forbidden
© Rayowrites
