EPISODE 3
He stood up slowly, and for one terrible, suspended second, I thought he was going to walk away from me entirely, out of that kitchen, out of that house, back to wherever the version of himself that still respected his brother’s marriage was hiding.
Instead, he closed the distance between us and kissed me again, this time without hesitation, without the trembling uncertainty of the first one, and something in that kitchen that had held seven years of my marriage together simply, quietly, gave way.
I am not going to pretend what happened after that was anything other than what it was.
I will say only this. That night marked the beginning of something neither Damilare nor I were prepared to name, something that existed in that house for nearly four months in a kind of desperate, guilty secrecy, both of us fully aware of exactly how much we stood to destroy, and neither of us, God forgive me, strong enough to stop.
We were careful. Or we told ourselves we were careful.
We never spoke of it during the day, moved through our normal routines, cooked dinner together, watched films together, existed as “sister” and “brother” in front of the small circle of people who occasionally visited, Tobi’s mother, a few of my own friends, the neighbor who sometimes borrowed sugar. At night, when the house had settled into silence, the careful distance we maintained during daylight hours simply dissolved.
Tobi’s calls, when they finally resumed with their old frequency, no longer brought me the same relief they once did. I found myself, God help me, sometimes hoping his calls would go shorter, cut sooner, so I could return to the version of my evening that had somehow become more important to me than my own husband’s voice.
I hated myself for that. I want to be completely honest about that. There was no single night during those four months where guilt did not visit me, sometimes quietly, sometimes violently, in the middle of ordinary moments, folding laundry, cooking rice, brushing my teeth, guilt would simply arrive and sit with me like an unwelcome guest who refused to leave.
Damilare carried his own version of that same guilt, I could see it in him some mornings, a heaviness behind his eyes, a distance in his voice that had nothing to do with the distance we usually maintained for appearances. Once, in the third month, he tried to end it.
“We have to stop this, Zainab,” he said one night, sitting on the edge of my bed, his shirt still unbuttoned, his voice raw. “Every single day this continues is another day I’m betraying my own brother in the worst way a person can betray family. I don’t know how to keep looking at his photograph on your nightstand and pretending I haven’t done what I’ve done.”
I agreed with him completely. We both meant it, fully, in that moment.
We lasted eleven days before we found ourselves back in exactly the same place, drawn together by something that had stopped being simple loneliness months earlier and had become something far more complicated, something that felt, terrifyingly, like it might actually be love, however impossible, however forbidden, however certain to destroy everything it touched.
Then, in the fifth month, Tobi called with news that changed everything.
“My contract’s been extended by another year,” he said, his voice tired but hopeful, “but there’s good news too. They’re flying me home for two weeks next month. A proper visit. I miss you so much, Zainab. I can’t wait to hold you again.”
I sat frozen on that call, my eyes finding Damilare across the room, watching my face carefully, already understanding from my expression alone exactly what I had just been told.
Two weeks.
Tobi would be home in a house where his own brother had spent five months sleeping beside his wife, where evidence of an affair he could never imagine existed in every corner, in the careful new habits Damilare and I had built without fully realizing how deeply they had settled into the rhythm of that home.
Damilare’s face, when I finally hung up the phone, had gone completely pale.
“He’s coming home,” I said quietly, unnecessarily, since he had clearly already understood.
“Two weeks,” Damilare repeated, sitting down heavily. “Zainab, we have exactly two weeks to figure out what we’re going to do, because I promise you, the moment Tobi walks through that door and looks at either one of our faces, he is going to know something is wrong. He’s known me my entire life. He will see it.”
I did not sleep at all that night, lying beside a man who was not my husband, in a bed my husband had bought for the two of us, trying to imagine any version of the next two weeks that did not end with either a confession, a discovery, or a lie so enormous it would have to be carried for the rest of all our lives.
On the seventh day of that impossible countdown, Damilare came to me with a decision that shocked me more than anything that had happened in the previous five months combined.
Title: What the Distance Made Me Do
#story #storytelling #forbidden
© Rayowrites
