Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Marley
I dropped onto the bench, the wood rough against my palms, and let out a long, shaky breath that felt like it had been trapped in my chest for weeks.
The April sun sifted through the cherry blossoms, dusting the path with pink petals that clung to my boots like tiny accusations of beauty I couldn’t appreciate anymore.
I tugged at the collar of my jacket and watched a kid chase a kite across the lawn, his laughter filling the park with the kind of joy I’d forgotten existed.
The wind kept tossing my hair into my eyes until I finally shoved it back. I couldn’t even tell the last time I’d bothered with a trim. Plus, it felt strangely soft against my fingers, which felt like a lie since everything else in my life was currently coming undone.
Irrespective of that, it reminded me of her hands threading through these same strands months ago.
I still remembered the way she’d twist them around her knuckles while we lay in my bed, talking about everything and nothing.
How she’d tug gently when I said something that made her laugh.
How she’d smooth it back from my forehead when she thought I was sleeping.
I had come here to escape the suffocating silence in my apartment, to run from the ache that had burrowed itself so deeply in my ribs that I couldn’t tell where it ended and I began. To stop thinking about her for five fucking minutes.
But even as I sat there surrounded by strangers and an open sky, everything felt too taut and too immediate. The brightness of the day mocked the darkness spreading through my chest like spilled ink. And the craziest thing was that such brightness had always reminded me of her anyway.
I pulled out my phone, my thumb already swiping to Instagram before I had made a conscious decision. Maybe I could lose myself in mindless videos, let someone else’s perfectly curated life distract me from the wreckage of my own.
But as I scrolled through my main feed, watching people celebrate promotions and new relationships and ordinary Tuesday afternoons, my finger slowed, then stopped.
Without any permission from my rational mind, I found myself tapping the search bar.
I stared at the blank space for a long moment, my heart already picking up speed like it knew what I was about to do to myself.
This was all shades of stupid. Pathetic, even. This was exactly the kind of behaviour I used to mock in other people, the desperate digital stalking of someone who had already walked away.
But my chest felt hollow and scraped raw, and I needed something, anything, to fill the space where hope used to live. I needed to know she was okay, even if knowing would destroy me a little more.
My fingers trembled as I typed her name, each letter feeling like a small betrayal of my promise to myself to let her go.
K-e-l-e-c-h-i space O-b-i.
The letters blurred slightly as my vision wavered, but I kept typing anyway.
Several accounts populated the screen. I scanned each profile picture with the desperation of someone looking for water in a desert, my chest tightening with each wrong face. Most were clearly not her, too young, wrong features.
But one made my breath catch in my throat like a fishhook.
The profile was sparse, almost empty. Just a heart emoji in the bio and a close-up photo of lips as the profile picture.
But I knew those lips.
I had memorised the way they curved when she was trying not to smile, the way they pressed together when she was thinking about something serious. The way they parted when I touched her just right, the soft sounds that would escape them when she forgot to be self-conscious.
The way they felt against mine in the darkness of my room when the rest of the world ceased to exist.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I clicked on her profile, the sound so loud I was sure the elderly woman feeding pigeons nearby could hear it. Or maybe it was just me exaggerating.
The main grid was empty. Typical Kelechi.
She’d always been private about social media, said it felt too performative, too much like putting on a show for strangers.
But there was a small number next to the tagged photos section that made my stomach drop.
I hesitated, my thumb hovering over the screen. To be honest, this felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, knowing I was about to jump but unable to stop myself from looking down first.
I tapped it anyway.
The first photo began loading with the sluggish cruelty of torture, and I could hear my pulse in my ears, could taste the metallic tang of anxiety on my tongue.
When the image finally sharpened into focus, the air left my lungs in a rush that left me dizzy.
She was sitting in a restaurant booth, wearing a white satin robe that caught the overhead lighting and made her skin glow.
A rhinestone tiara sat slightly crooked on her dark hair, catching the light in tiny rainbow fragments.
A pink sash stretched across her chest with Bride to Be written in gold script that might as well have been written in my blood.
The five women around her held their champagne flutes with the kind of ease that only comes when you actually believe in happy endings.
They looked good in their coordinated outfits and easy smiles.
But Kelechi’s expression was off.
I’d spent months watching her, learning the specific way her eyes crinkled when she found something truly funny. I knew that her left dimple only showed up when she was caught off guard by real joy.
This wasn’t that.
This was just the face she put on for everyone else, the careful, practised version of the woman they all expected her to be.
I zoomed in on her face with shaking fingers, my vision blurring at the edges.
Her eyes held that distant quality I’d grown to dread, like she was somewhere else entirely, somewhere safe inside her own head where she could hide from whatever was happening to her body.
Even surrounded by celebration, she looked small and lost and utterly alone.
The woman next to her had the same nose, the same delicate jawline that had driven me crazy when I’d trace it with my fingertips in the early morning light.
Her sister, probably.
She was leaning into Kelechi with joy radiating from her face, her arm wrapped around the shoulders I’d once known better than my own. Completely unaware that the guest of honour looked like she was drowning in plain sight.
I swiped to the next photo.
Same scene. Different angles.
In this one, I could see her hands folded tightly in her lap. Her smile was still in place, still perfectly appropriate for the occasion, but her body looked wound tight as a spring about to snap.
My chest constricted until I couldn’t draw a full breath, until the cherry blossoms started to blur into pink smears against the blue sky.
This was happening.
Oh my goodness; this was actually happening.
In a few weeks, maybe less, she’d walk down an aisle toward someone else. She’d wear a white gown and promise forever to a man her family had chosen. A man who fit what they wanted in ways I never could and never would.
She would smile that same hollow smile and everyone would call it the happiest day of her life.
And I would be here.
Watching through a screen.
Reduced to a stranger.
A fucking spectator to the demolition of the only thing that had ever made me want forever.
I set my phone down on the bench and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars.
I wasn’t going to pretend I hadn’t always known this would end.
From the moment I had first kissed her, from the first time she had looked at me with so much passion, I had known we were temporary.
After all, she had been honest about her engagement, about her family’s demands, about the life waiting for her back home.
But somewhere between watching her laugh at my terrible jokes, feeling her relax into my touch, and hearing her whisper my name in the darkness when I was inside her, the world outside had ceased to exist.
And I had started to hope.
I had started to let myself believe that what we had might be worth fighting for.
That maybe, just maybe, love would be stronger than duty.
That she would choose what we had over the safe path her family had paved out for her.
I had let myself imagine a future where she stayed. Where we built something real together. A future where I got to keep her.
But hope, it turned out, was just another word for delusion.
The photo was still glowing on my phone screen when I picked it up again.
I stared at her face, searching for any trace of the woman I had come to know.
The woman who’d made me Nigerian turkey stew or jollof and fried plantains on lazy Sunday afternoons.
Who teased me for the way I sang in the shower, even though I sounded like a dying cat.
But all I could see was resignation.
The same expression she wore when she talked about not disappointing the people who mattered. About being the daughter they needed her to be.
The same distant look she’d get when she stared out my apartment window as if she were calculating the distance between where she was and where she was supposed to be.
Apparently, I wasn’t one of those people.
The ones who mattered.
Two weeks ago, after our messy argument, Atlas had stood in my doorway, her fist raised to continue the assault on my door that had been going on for what felt like hours.
I had heard her knocking. I had listened to her voice calling my name through the door. But moving felt impossible.
Everything felt impossible.
When I finally dragged myself off the couch to answer, she took one look at me and her expression shifted from irritation to alarm.
“I’ve been calling you for four days,” she said, pushing past me into the apartment without waiting for an invitation. “You always pick up my calls, Marley. Always.”
I watched her take in the scene with the detached observation of someone watching a car accident: dishes piled in the sink like a monument to my inability to function, curtains drawn tight against a world I couldn’t bear to look at, empty tissue boxes scattered across the coffee table.
The air felt stale, matching the weight in my chest that had been growing since Kelechi had walked out of my life and taken all the oxygen with her.
“Are you okay?” she asked, but her voice was gentle now.
I had tried to answer, tried to form words that would explain the crater that had opened up where my heart used to be. The way I’d been walking around feeling like I was missing limbs.
Instead, what came out was: “Kelechi’s getting married in April.”
The words tasted like poison in my mouth, like admitting something that would make it more real than it already was.
Her face had gone through a series of expressions: confusion, understanding, then something close to grief.
She’d sunk onto my couch, pulling me down beside her with the gentle insistence of someone who’d been mopping up my disasters since we were kids.
“Oh, honey,” she’d murmured, and her arms had come around me like a shield against a world that suddenly felt too full of things I couldn’t have. “I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry you’re going through this.”
I began crying then.
Ugly sobs that came from somewhere deeper than tears, from the place where hope goes to die.
She held me while I shook apart, her hand stroking my hair the way my mother used to when I was small, when the world felt too big and too cruel for someone my size.
“I know this doesn’t help right now,” she’d said into my hair, “but maybe this is just how it has to be. Sometimes life is cruel in ways that don’t make sense. Sometimes the people we love can’t love us back the way we need them to.”
I’d pulled away then, wiping my face with the back of my hand, my skin raw and hot.
“I thought she’d choose me. God, Atlas, I actually thought she might choose me.”
Atlas had stayed quiet for a long moment, just looking at me with those blue eyes that had seen me through every stage of my life.
“Love isn’t always enough, Mar. I wish it was, but sometimes it isn’t.”
Now, sitting on this bench with cherry blossoms falling around me like snow, I could feel those same tears building behind my eyes.
My finger traced the outline of her face on the screen, following the curve of her cheek, the line of her jaw that I’d kissed a thousand times.
“Maybe in another lifetime,” I whispered to the empty air, to the universe that had decided I wasn’t allowed to keep the one thing that had ever made me feel complete. “Maybe in another lifetime, you would have been brave enough to choose me.”
The tears came then.
Hot and unstoppable.
Falling onto the phone screen until her face became a watercolour blur of brown skin and white satin and all the dreams I’d been stupid enough to believe in.
I cried for the future we would never have.
For the mornings, I would wake up alone without her next to me.
I cried until the kid with the kite went home and the park grew quiet around my grief.
And even then, I couldn’t stop.