My Husband’s Dead First Wife Walked Back Through Our Door on Our Fifth Anniversary — Pointing at the One Man I Trusted Most

Chapter 2

The word came out of her like a curse. “Her.”

I could not breathe. “No. That is a lie. I was living in another village when you had your accident.”

“You did not know me,” Ngozi agreed, calm and patient, a woman who had rehearsed this speech for years. “But you knew my husband. You saw him at a wedding two years before I died. You fell in love with him. So you paid someone to run my car off the road.”

Chinedu turned to me, his eyes the eyes of a man reading a stranger. “Adaora. Is this true?”

“I swear, Chinedu, I never did that. I did not even know you existed until after she died. Ask my mother. Ask anyone.”

Ngozi pulled a photograph from her gown and laid it on the table like evidence. Me, younger, standing outside the village church. Beside me, a man I knew better than my own reflection. My uncle. Uncle Obiora.

“So what?” My voice came out high and strange. “That is my uncle. Everyone knows my uncle. He is a mechanic.”

“Your uncle. Who worked on cars. Who fixed brakes. Who knew exactly how to make a vehicle fail on the Okigwe road.”

She pulled out a second photograph that stopped my heart. My uncle and I at a restaurant, a thick stack of naira notes passing across the table to me. I had never seen that money. I had never sat in that restaurant. The photograph did not care.

“Your uncle came to see me in the hospital,” she said, dropping to a whisper. “He thought I was still in my coma. He leaned over my bed and whispered, ‘I am sorry, Ngozi. But my niece wanted your husband. And I would do anything for my niece.'”

“No. No, no, no. He would never say that. You are lying.”

Chinedu grabbed my arm, his fingers biting into my skin. “Adaora. Is there something you are not telling me?”

“Chinedu, I swear on my mother’s life, I did not know. I never wanted anyone dead. I only wanted to be loved. I gave you everything I had.”

He let go of my arm. He looked from me to Ngozi and back. I watched him make a decision. “I need to know the truth. I need to talk to your uncle.”

We called him. He said he would come right away. I spent that hour on the floor of my sitting room, watching the rain fall, praying to a God I was not sure was listening, while the ghost of my husband’s first wife sat in my chair, drank my water, and smiled.

Then headlights swept across the wall. My uncle’s car. I knew the sound of its engine the way a child knows her mother’s heartbeat.

He had come to answer for a crime I did not believe he had committed. In the space of the next hour, everything I believed about my life was going to collapse.