Faith can move mountains, they say. My faith in my husband moved me to sell everything I owned. When Obinna told me he had cancer, I didn’t question; I acted. Shaving my head felt like a small, powerful ritual, an outward sign of the inner journey we would take together. The real journey, however, was a financial scramble of terrifying proportions. Fifteen million naira was the ransom for his life, and I was the sole negotiator. I liquidated my catering business—the vans, the shop, all of it. I sold the gold meant for my daughters’ futures. I took a loan that put my family’s heritage at risk. Every naira I raised was a piece of my past traded for our future.
He left for treatment, and I became a woman of waiting and prayer. The video calls from India were my oxygen. Then, they ceased. The void of no news became a chasm of suspicion. The truth, when it found me, was crueler than any feared death. Obinna was in Lagos, not a hospital. He was in a G-Wagon, not a gown. The woman beside him, expecting his child, was the real beneficiary of my life’s work. There had been no cancer. It was a story, a “strategy” to unlock my devotion and my resources. The money funded his new identity as the husband of a politician’s daughter. My devastation was just collateral damage.
He offered a pathetic wad of cash as consolation and drove off into his new life. I was left with a bald head growing back in patches, three confused children, and a mountain of debt. I have learned to live in this new, quieter reality. Now, fortune has flipped again. His patron is in jail, his new wife is gone, and the man who discarded me wants to return. His messengers speak of forgiveness and family. They paint me as the gatekeeper to redemption. But I look at my children, who watched me break myself for a lie, and I look at my own reflection, still bearing the marks of his deception. To let him back would be to teach them that love is a currency to be stolen. My faith now is in the peace of his absence, not the chaos of his return.
