She Was Still His Wife. He Just Forgot to Tell the Other Woman.
The message came through on a Tuesday afternoon in October 2022. Adaeze was standing at the kitchen counter chopping onions for jollof rice when her phone lit up on the worktop. A Facebook notification. A name she did not recognise. A woman called Priya.
She wiped her hands on a tea towel and opened it.
Priya said she was sorry to do this. Said she had found Adaeze through Marcus’s profile, and she knew this would be hard to hear, but she had been seeing Marcus for nearly two years. She had found out about Adaeze three days ago. Not before then. She had genuinely not known. She just thought Adaeze deserved to know the truth, because she would have wanted someone to tell her.
Adaeze read it twice. Then she put the phone face-down on the counter, finished chopping the onions, and went to pick Zara up from school.
Zara was eight and going through a horse phase. The whole walk home she talked about whether Arabians or Clydesdales were better, and Adaeze said “mm” in the right places, and held her daughter’s hand at the crossings, and did not cry.
She and Marcus had been married for eleven years by then. They had a three-bedroom in Walthamstow that they bought as a near-wreck in 2015 and spent three years fixing up slowly, one room at a time. They had a Saturday routine involving the market on Hoe Street and too much coffee. They argued about whose turn it was to deal with the downstairs restaurant when the music went past midnight. Normal arguments. The kind you stop even noticing you are having.
She had thought they were fine. She had thought fine was what they were.
She called Marcus at 5pm, after Zara was settled with a snack and a cartoon. He answered on the second ring, slightly distracted, “hey you.” She said she needed him to come home.
He asked if everything was okay.
She said, “No.”
He was home by half past six. He sat down at the kitchen table, across from where she was already sitting, and he did not deny anything. She had prepared herself for a different version of this. She had expected to need evidence, to make a case, to fight to be believed. Instead he looked at his hands and said, “I know. I’ve known it was only a matter of time.”
She asked him how long.
He said just under two years.
She sat with that. Almost two years. Zara had been six when it started. She tried to think of what she had been doing in autumn 2020, and all she could remember was that they were both working from home, and she had been worried about her mother, and the days had blurred. She had been distracted. She had not been watching.
She asked him if he loved her. Priya, she meant. He said he did not know. He said he was sorry. He said he had been a coward for a long time and he did not have a better explanation than that.
They talked for two hours. At one point Zara came downstairs for water and Marcus got up and got it for her and sent her back to bed, and Adaeze watched him do it, and thought: he is a good father. He had always been a good father. She had never once doubted that.
She asked him to sleep in the spare room. He said okay.
That was eighteen months ago. He is still in the spare room. Zara still does not know the details, though she is ten now and sharper than she lets on, and sometimes she looks at Adaeze with a question in her eyes that she has not quite formed into words yet.
Priya sent one more message in February, to say she was sorry, and that she hoped Adaeze was all right. Adaeze typed three different replies and deleted all of them.
Marcus asks every few weeks whether she wants him to leave. She says she will let him know.
She does not know what she wants. She had always assumed she would know. Had always thought that if something like this happened, she would feel certain of something. Anger, or the door, or forgiveness. One clear feeling she could follow somewhere.
It turns out you can share a bed with someone for eleven years and still not know, when it matters, what you want from them.
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