A TRUE LOVE STORY EVERYONE MUST WATCH  

The evening Gidenna Okafor told Chioma Muosu that he loved her, the generator in her compound had just gone off and the only light in the world was a single candle on the table between them. He had reached across and taken her hand and she had looked at him the way women only look at a man once in their lifetime, completely, without reservation, without armor.

 They had been together for 3 years by then. 3 years of shared pepper soup at Mama Chioma’s buka on Iwo Road. 3 years of Sunday afternoon walks along the riverbank, of arguments about football and politics, of him falling asleep on her lap while she read her novels, of how waking him up with a flick to the forehead and both of them laughing until their stomachs hurt.

Chioma was 24. She taught in a primary school, Sunrise Academy in Enugu, a job she had taken not because it paid well, it did not, but because she loved children and believed that the future of Nigeria sat in those small wooden classrooms. She was the kind of woman who remembered everyone’s birthday, who would give her last 1,000 naira to a stranger who looked hungry, who sang under her breath when she was happy and went very quiet when she was not.

Gidenna was 26. He had a degree in civil engineering from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, but the degree had not opened the doors he expected. He had worked 2 years at a small construction firm in Enugu that paid irregularly and promoted nobody. He was brilliant, ambitious and beginning to suffocate. Then the letter came.

 His cousin Obiora, who had gone to Canada 3 years before, had found him a way in, a study permit, a small apartment waiting, a part-time job at a supermarket to start. The rest, Obiora wrote, was up to Gidenna’s hustle. Gidenna read the letter four times. Then he sat down on his bed and stared at the wall for a long time.

 That night he went to Chioma. She was in the kitchen frying plantain, the sweet smell of it filling the small apartment she shared with her roommate, who had conveniently stepped out. She heard the knock and called out for him to enter and he came in and sat at the kitchen table and watched her and did not say anything for so long that she turned around and looked at him.

 “What happened?” she said. He placed the letter on the table. She wiped her hands with a cloth and picked it up. He watched her face as she read. He watched the careful stillness that came over her. She put the letter down. She turned back to the stove and turned the plantain, though it did not need turning yet. “Canada,” she said. “Yes.

” A long silence. The oil popped. “How long?” she asked. “2-3 years. Obiora says if I work hard, save money, I can come back with enough to start something real, a business, our own house, everything we talked about.” Chioma did not turn around. He could see the line of her shoulders. “Chioma.” She turned then and her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady. That was the thing about Chioma.

She could be falling apart inside and her voice would stay steady like a plumb line. “So you’re going?” It was not a question. “I don’t want to leave you, he said. You know that, but I can’t build a life here, not the kind of life you deserve, not on what I earn now.” She nodded slowly.

 She took the plantain off the fire, placed it on a plate and set it in front of him. She sat down across from him. She looked at him for a long time. “2-3 years,” she said. “I promise. And you’ll come back for me?” “I swear on everything,” he said. He reached across the table the same way he had reached across the table by candlelight and took both her hands.

 “2-3 years maximum. I’ll save. I’ll come back. I’ll meet your family properly. We’ll do everything right. I swear to you, Chioma.” She looked at him for a long time. Then she squeezed his hands. “Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll wait.” He pulled her into his arms right there in the kitchen and held her so tightly she gasped.

 She pressed her face against his chest and breathed him in and she told herself it was 2 years, it was nothing, it was the price of a future and she believed it. She believed every word. The first thing Gidenna noticed about Canada was the cold, not just weather cold, so cold, the kind of cold that gets into your bones and reminds you every single morning that you are far from home and that nobody out here cares whether you live or die.

 He arrived in October. By November he had worked four jobs in 5 weeks. The supermarket let him go after he made an error on a stock sheet. He washed dishes at a restaurant downtown for 3 weeks until the restaurant downsized. He worked 2 weeks at a warehouse before a back injury from lifting nearly put him under.

 He drove for a rideshare app on nights and weekends until his car, Obiora’s old Honda that he was paying back in installments, broke down. Obiora was kind, but Obiora had his own life, a wife, a toddler, a mortgage. Gidenna could not stay indefinitely in his cousin’s basement. He found a room in a shared house, six men from different countries in a three-bedroom flat, taking shifts so the beds were never full. He paid his share of the rent.

Some weeks that meant skipping meals. He remembered with a bitterness he could not name the nights he had gone to bed with nothing but water in his stomach, listening to the pipes groan in the cold and wondering how it was possible that a man with an engineering degree could be this invisible, this irrelevant, this small.

 He called Chioma on video every Sunday. Those calls were the only thing that felt real. “How is it going?” she would ask and he would smile and say, “Slowly, slowly, but I’m managing.” He never told her about the hunger. He never told her about the nights he sat in the parking lot of a 24-hour pharmacy at 2:00 in the morning because he could not face the flat, could not face the cold room, could not face himself.

 He never told her about the tears. He could not bear for her to pity him. He could not bear to look like a failure in her eyes. And she, for her part, told him about her classes, about the children, about a boy named Tobechukwu in primary three who had made her laugh so hard she snorted during assembly.

 She told him about her mother’s latest attempt to introduce her to the son of a deacon in their church. She told him she had said no, that she was seeing someone and that the someone was coming back for her. “Tell them to keep trying,” Gidenna said. And he was joking and he was not joking. “I’m not interested in anyone else,” she said. “Come home fast.

” He hung up the phone and sat in the car and promised himself he would. He would work harder, save faster, come home. But Canada was not interested in his promises. He found a better job eventually, a construction company that needed laborers. The pay was better, the work was brutal. He poured concrete in winter cold that made his fingers numb inside his gloves.

 He carried materials up scaffolding that swayed in the wind. He came home every night with his body screaming and fell asleep in his clothes, but the money was real and he was saving. He opened a bank account and watched the number grow, slowly, agonizingly slowly. He spoke to Chioma less often as the months compressed into themselves.

 First every Sunday, then every 2 weeks. He told himself it was because of the long hours and this was partly true, but it was also because he was ashamed, because the 2 years he had promised were becoming three and it was becoming uncertain, because every time he heard her voice, he felt the gap between who he had promised to be and who he actually was and the gap was widening.

 He told himself it was temporary. He told himself it was all for her. He was still telling himself this on the afternoon, 18 months after his arrival, when a colleague named Tunde introduced him to a woman named Patricia. Patricia Adeyinka was 41 years old, 12 years older than Gidenna, and she had built herself from nothing. She had come to Canada 20 years before with a student visa and a suitcase and a ferocity that the cold had never managed to touch.

 She had a master’s degree in business administration, a three-bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood, a car that was paid for and a position as a senior manager at a consulting firm called Nexus Advisory. She had been married once, briefly, to a man who had proved unworthy and she had decided after the divorce that she would not settle again unless she found exactly what she was looking for.

 When Tunde introduced her to Gidenna at a Nigerian community event in a church hall, she looked at him the way one looks at a thing one intends to acquire. Gidenna was too tired to notice. He ate the jollof rice they served at the event with genuine gratitude, real Nigerian food, properly made, and made polite conversation and thought nothing of it when Patricia found reasons to speak to him again that evening. She was warm.

She was funny. She asked intelligent questions about engineering. She seemed genuinely interested in him. She texted him the next day. He replied out of politeness. She invited him to dinner and because he had not had a proper meal at a table in months, he went. She cooked ofe nnu anu and ofe akwu, the soups of his childhood, rich and properly made, and he sat at her dining table in her warm house and felt for the first time in 18 months like a human being. She did not push.

 She was patient. She told him about her life, asked about his, listened without the urgency of someone with an agenda. She texted good morning. She sent food to his flat. She brought him groceries. When his car needed a part he could not afford, she paid for it without being asked and waved his objections away. “We’re Nigerians,” she said.

 “We take care of each other.” He told himself that was all it was, that she was being kind, that he would repay her eventually, that it meant nothing. But she was warm and his life was cold. She was full and his life was empty. She was present and Chioma was a voice on a screen that he was speaking to less and less often now, a voice that reminded him of a life he was failing to return to.

 One evening, she touched his hand across the table and he did not move his hand away. That was how it started. Six weeks later, she sat him down and told him she had spoken to her company’s director about him. She had recommended him for a junior engineering consulting position. The role paid seven times what he made on the construction site.

 There would be health benefits, a pension, a desk and a computer, and a salary that could genuinely change his life. You are too qualified for what you’re doing, she said. This is where you belong. He got the job. The day he got the letter he sat in her living room, and something broke open in him. He cried.

 He could not help it. She came and sat beside him and put her arms around him and held him while he cried. And in that moment, in her arms, in that warm house, he stopped fighting what he had been fighting for 2 months. He kissed her, and everything after that happened very fast. They were engaged within 4 months.

 He told himself that it made sense. She had pulled him out of drowning. She was reliable, established, present. The relationship had a solidity that his life had not had since he arrived. His bank account was growing. His life was beginning to look like something. He told himself that what he had felt for Chioma was young love, the love of two people who had not yet been tested by real life.

 He told himself it was not wrong to move forward. He told himself Chioma would meet someone else and be fine. She was beautiful, she was wonderful, she would be fine. He stopped calling. Not suddenly, it tapered. He told himself he would call next week. Then next week became the week after. There was always a reason. He was busy. He was tired.

 He would explain everything once he had figured out how to explain it. He sent a text once, vague and distancing. Chioma, I’m sorry. Things here have become complicated. I think we should let each other go. He did not wait for her reply. He turned off his phone and felt sick, and then convinced himself that the sickness was just guilt, and that guilt would pass.

He married Patricia 6 months after they got together. A small ceremony at a Nigerian church in Toronto. Tunde was his best man. Cousins and community friends filled the hall. There was plenty of food. Patricia wore white and looked beautiful and proud. And he smiled in all the photographs. In the middle of the reception, he went to the bathroom and locked the door and stood over the sink and looked at himself in the mirror for a long time.

Then he splashed cold water on his face and went back out and danced with his wife. He did not think about Chioma. He would not allow himself to. Their son, David, was born 11 months after the wedding. Jidenna held him in the hospital room and felt something he had not expected. Pure, uncomplicated joy. David was small and warm, and he smelled of something new and holy.

And Jidenna looked at him and thought, this is what it was for. Patricia recovered fast. She was efficient even in motherhood. She hired a part-time nanny. She returned to work 3 months after the birth. They bought a larger house in a better neighborhood. Jidenna was promoted at Nexus Advisory.

 2 years after David, the twins came. Girls, Chiamaka and Chidimma. The house erupted. Patricia’s mother came to help for 3 months. There were cribs in two rooms and laundry every day. And Jidenna learned to function on 4 hours of sleep. But he loved them with a fierceness that surprised him. He coached David Saturday morning football.

 He changed nappies without being asked. He read to the girls at bedtime, doing voices that made them shriek with laughter. Three children in 3 years, a house, a career, a wife who was competent and successful and cared for their family with military precision. From the outside, it looked perfect. From the inside, it was not unhappy, exactly, but empty in a way he could not explain.

 Patricia and he were partners more than lovers. They were efficient together. They coordinated schedules, divided responsibilities, managed the household like a small corporation. She did not ask about his feelings. He did not ask about hers. They were civil and organized and occasionally warm, and they slept on separate sides of the bed.

 He told himself this was what marriage was. He told himself the honeymoon period passed for everyone. He told himself he was lucky. The children were real. The children were everything. The rest he managed. It was a Sunday afternoon in September, the kind of afternoon that Canada does beautifully in the last weeks before the cold. The sky so blue it looked painted.

The trees beginning to turn gold and amber. The air cool, but not yet merciless. The children were inside watching television. Patricia had said she was going to a work colleague’s baby shower and had left 2 hours ago. Jidenna was in the garden with a cup of tea, sitting on the wooden bench by the flower bed, looking at nothing in particular.

He had a rare 2 hours to himself, and he was not sure what to do with them. He sat and drank his tea. He was thinking vaguely about David’s school play next week and whether the suit Patricia had chosen for him was too formal when he heard the beep. He looked down at the bench beside him. A phone. Not his. His was in his pocket.

This one was smaller with a pink case. Patricia’s second phone. He had not known she had a second phone. He stared at it. The screen lit up again. A message notification. He could see it from where he sat. My love, we need to be more careful. Also, I went for the test. Same result as before. We need to talk about what to do before he finds out.

 Jidenna did not move for a very long time. The garden was very quiet. He picked up the phone. It was not locked. Patricia had never expected to leave it in the garden. He opened the message. The conversation went back 2 years. He scrolled. He read. He read every message from the beginning. From when David was 4 months old. From when he had been so proud and so full.

 And he read what had been happening in the parallel universe of his wife’s other phone while he had been changing nappies and reading bedtime stories and believing himself a family man. There was a name, Segun. There were hotel names. There were dates. Dates he could match to evenings she had been at work events, to mornings she had been at the gym, to entire weekends when her mother had supposedly needed her.

 And then same result as before. He thought about the twins. He thought about David. He thought about the particular way they all had his wife’s nose, her precise nose and not his. And he had always thought it was a funny joke of genetics. He thought about the test. He stood up from the bench. He was not sure when he had stood.

 He was holding the phone so tightly his knuckles had gone pale. His legs were shaking. His tea had gone cold on the bench. He opened his mouth. Patricia! The scream tore out of him like something ripping. It came from somewhere below his chest, from some chamber of himself he had not known existed. Inside the house, David’s television went silent.

 Patricia! The back door opened. Patricia came through the back door with her hair still neat and her handbag over her shoulder and a look of irritation on her face at the shouting. And then she saw his face, and the look became something else entirely. She stopped on the steps. Jidenna, who is Segun? The name hit the air between them like a stone hitting water.

 He watched her face. He watched happen behind her eyes, the rapid internal accounting of someone trying to determine how much was known and how much could still be managed. Jidenna, let me explain. I said, who is Segun? His voice had gone very quiet. That was worse than the shouting. She looked at the phone in his hand.

 She looked at the garden bench where she had left it. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, she was not calculating anymore. She was just empty. He’s nobody, she said, and her voice broke on the last word, and she hated herself for that because it meant the lie had already collapsed before she told it. Your second phone says different.

 He held it up. 2 years, Patricia. 2 years in here. She sat down on the step. Not gracefully, not deliberately, she just sat. Suddenly, as though her legs had made a decision her brain was still arguing with. She put her face in her hands. I’m sorry, she said. The words fell into the garden and disappeared. The children, he said. The test.

 What test? She did not answer. Patricia. He walked to the steps and crouched down so his face was level with hers. He gently, deliberately moved her hands away from her face. He needed to see her eyes. He needed her to be present for this. What test? Her eyes were red. Her mascara had tracked down one cheek in a thin dark line. I don’t know, she whispered.

 You don’t know what? I don’t know whose they are. Her voice was barely sound. I swear to you I don’t know. It was it started before David, before we even tried for David. I told myself it was over. I tried to end it, but it wasn’t over, and then I was pregnant, and I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know. He stood up.

 He walked to the far end of the garden. He stood there with his back to her, looking at the fence. His children. His three children. His David who liked dinosaurs and slept with his fist under his chin. His Chiamaka who laughed at everything. His Chidimma who was so serious, so quietly intense, the one he always said was most like him. Like him.

Something cracked inside I did not occur for that afternoon. Not broke. Break is too violent, too quick. This was a slow, structural crack. The kind that runs through the foundation of a building. Invisible until the day the whole thing shifts. He had her still talking behind him. Apologies, explanations, justifications.

 The words washed over him and did not reach him. He was somewhere else entirely. He was in a kitchen in Enugu and there was the smell of frying plantain and a woman with steady eyes was reading a letter across the table from him and her shoulders had that careful stillness and she had said, “Okay, then I’ll wait.

” He had promised her, she had waited. He had sent her a cowardly text and turned off his phone and convinced himself she would be fine and built a life on top of that abandonment and called it moving forward. He turned around. “I need you to go inside.” He said. “Take the children somewhere. Your mother’s, a friend’s, I don’t care, but I need you to go. Chidinma, please.

” She looked at him for a moment, then she wiped her face, stood up and went inside. He did not sleep that night. He sat in the living room after they were gone in the quiet house with the children’s toys still scattered on the carpet and a half-drunk glass of milk David had left on the table and he thought about his life from the beginning.

 He thought about the letter from Obiora. He thought about Chioma at the kitchen stove. He thought about the Sunday calls that had become fortnightly and then monthly and then nothing. He thought about the text he had sent her. “I think we should let each other go.” and the cowardice of sending it and then switching off his phone so he would not have to hear her response.

 He thought about Patricia’s warm kitchen and the offer of Enugu and the way gratitude and loneliness had conspired to make him mistake them for love. He thought about David sleeping upstairs in his grandmother’s house tonight not knowing that his father’s world was ending. He thought about DNA tests, about the lab results that might shatter him further and he decided that right now, tonight, he could not think about that.

 That was a door he was not ready to open. What he was ready to open was his laptop. He went to a booking website and searched for flights to Nigeria. The first available flight with a seat was in two days, Lagos, connecting through Amsterdam. He booked it before he could argue himself out of it. He paid with the savings account Patricia did not have access to, money he had put away quietly over years, the old habit of a man who had once known what it was to have nothing.

 Then he sent his boss a message, “Family emergency in Nigeria.” requesting two weeks urgent leave. Then he sat back and looked at the ceiling of his living room and asked himself if he had any idea what he was doing. He did not, but he knew this. He had thrown away something real for something shiny and the shiny thing had turned to rust.

 And somewhere in Nigeria was a woman who had waited for him and he needed to see her. He needed to look at her. He needed to apologize to her face, not to a screen, not in a text message. He pulled his suitcase from under the bed at 2:00 in the morning and began to pack. But the real question is, will Chioma receive him with open hands? Did she move on with her life? Will she forgive him and take him back? Will love win? Find out in part two.

 If you enjoyed the story that I am certain that you will enjoy the next story showing on the screen right now. Please click on the thumbnail and watch the next story. Please support me by liking this video, share with your family and friends and subscribe to my channel. See you in my next story. Bye.