I thought the hardest part would be losing the man I loved.
It turns out, the hardest part is waking up every day and confronting just how much of my life was built around his lies.
Everywhere I look, there are pieces of him. His jacket still hanging by the front door. His mug the chipped one he insisted on using every morning is still in the sink. There's a shirt of his folded neatly in the bottom drawer of my dresser. I should have thrown it away weeks ago.
I don't.
Not yet.
Not because I want to hold on to him, but because I need to hold on to the truth.
And the truth is he was here. He loved me in the only way he knew how. And then he broke me in the exact way I feared someone eventually would.
But I'm still standing.
And that matters more than the mug or the shirt or the drawer full of lies.
+++
Gloria knocks on my bedroom door around noon. I haven't left the house all day just sat at my desk, flipping through printouts from Mariam, cross-referencing account names and ghost vendors.
"Don't kill me," she says, peeking in, "but I booked you a wellness appointment."
I raise an eyebrow. "What, like therapy?"
"Exactly like therapy," she says, stepping in fully now. "You need someone neutral to talk to. And I need to know you're not bottling this up until you explode at the dry cleaner again."
"That was once."
"That poor boy still bows and cowers in fear when he sees me."
I smile reluctantly.
She hands me a card.
Dr. Ifeoma Ikenna – Clinical Psychologist. Women's Emotional Recovery.
I trace the name slowly. "Gloria…"
"Please. Just once. If you hate it, I'll never mention it again."
She looks at me the way only someone who's seen you cry in your bathrobe at 2 a.m. can.
I nod. "Fine. One session."
+++
Dr. Ifeoma's office smells like lemon balm and something floral I can't name. It's soft—earth-toned walls, framed affirmations, books stacked in gentle little towers. She greets me like we've known each other forever.
I sit on a plush armchair. She doesn't rush me.
Eventually, I speak.
"I was the kind of woman people looked at and said, 'She has it all together.'"
"And did you?" she asks.
"No," I whisper. "But I played the part. Until I didn't have to play anymore. Because someone else was writing the story."
She nods like she understands, and something inside me loosens.
We talk. About Kolade. About the company. About the baby. About fear.
"I don't want to raise a child from a place of bitterness," I tell her.
"And that's why you won't," she says, gently. "Because you already see the risk."
I leave her office feeling like someone poured cool water over my burning mind.
It doesn't fix anything.
But it helps.
+++
That night, I get an email from Mariam with the subject line: "Found Something".
I open it immediately. It's a scan of a signed contract Kolade's name, or rather the name he used, attached to an obscure shell company that redirected over ₦15 million from one of my subsidiaries last year, before we met or should I say before I met him.
Buried deep in legalese, it clearly links him to the fraud.
It's the proof we needed.
I forward it with a calm, steady hand.
To Mariam: "Let's file."
To my finance team: "Audit everything he touched. I want full transparency."
To myself: "You're doing the right thing."
Then I delete his contact from my phone.
It's time to stop speaking to the ghosts.