“You people are talking about peace and provision. I want life. I want to travel. I want fine things. I want a man who shows me off because he’s proud of what he has.”
“Exactly. Love is sweet, but love inside a fine house is sweeter.”
“And love with no stress is the sweetest of all.”
Kamsi listened. She had learned over the years that listening was not the same as agreement, and that silence was not the same as having nothing to say.
“Kamsi, you’re too quiet. Say something. What do you think?”
“I think we just got home.”
The room paused.
“See this girl? You think time is waiting for you? You think these men will be standing at the corner like taxis, available whenever you decide you’re ready?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying there’s a difference between choosing something and running to it because you’re afraid.”
“Fear, Kamsi? Nobody said anything about fear. We’re being realistic.”
“I just think deciding to marry because you’re afraid of being left behind is different from deciding to marry because you’re truly ready. Fear doesn’t make a good foundation.”
“You’ll understand when the pressure comes. Right now, you’re talking like someone who has never felt it. The pressure will come, Kamsi. It always comes.”
And it did.
It arrived wearing the faces of aunties at church who paused a second too long on your ringless finger.
It arrived in careful comparisons dropped like pepper into soup.
“You know Ada’s daughter, the one who graduated the same time as you? She’s already pregnant, oh. Her husband is in Abuja, doing very well. They just bought land.”
“Eh? Pregnant already?”
“Yes, oh.”
It arrived in the voices of mothers who loved their daughters genuinely and were afraid for them sincerely, and could not separate that love from the particular fear this town had taught them since girlhood: that a woman unattached was a woman unfinished.
Kamsi’s own mother said it gently one evening, when they were shelling egusi together on the veranda, not looking at her, as though the words were meant for the bowl.
“I’m not saying rush, my daughter. I’m just saying don’t sleep. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t sleep.”
“I’m not sleeping, Mama.”
“Good. Because this life does not refund time.”
Kamsi nodded and said nothing more. She cracked another seed between her fingers and let the silence sit between them without filling it.
She found a small learning center three streets away that needed someone to teach English and basic literacy to young children in the evenings. It paid very little. She took it without hesitation. During the days, she read. She wrote. She thought carefully and without panic about what she actually wanted her life to look like when no one was watching and no one was measuring.
Her friends were making different calculations.
Chioma had already begun attending every owambe and church social within a ten-kilometer radius, dressed with deliberate intention, arriving early enough to be noticed and late enough to be remembered.
Ada had started spending more time at her uncle’s shop in the market, not out of interest in the business, but because the men who came in to buy building materials were often the kind of men who were building something: a house, a future, a life they were ready to share.
Ifunanya had doubled her presence on social media, posting carefully arranged photographs from angles that made her family’s modest sitting room look like something from a Lagos interior design account. She was casting a net, and she was casting it wide.
And Kamsi watched all of it, not with judgment, not with pride, but with the quiet attention of someone who understood that the choices her friends were making were not made in selfishness alone. They were made in fear.
And fear, she knew, was always loudest in a town that never stopped watching.
Umuahia was watching, and all four of them could feel it.
Chioma was the first.
Nobody was surprised. Chioma had always moved with intention. She decided things the way she filed her nails, with calm, deliberate strokes, until the edge was exactly where she wanted it.
The man she found was called Emeka. He owned two filling stations in Owerri and drove a black Lexus that he washed himself every Saturday morning, which Chioma took as a sign of discipline. He was fifteen years older than her, quiet in the way that men who have money often are, as though they have already said everything worth saying and are simply waiting for the world to catch up.
They courted for four months. The introduction was loud and colorful. The wedding was louder.
“I told you all, a woman should never struggle when a man can carry the weight. That’s not laziness. That’s wisdom.”
“Chioma, you have done well, oh. You have done very well.”
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