My Best Friend Married the Man Who Almost Destroyed Me. I Still Went to the Wedding.

This was 2018, I was 27, and I had just moved back to Warri after a job in Port Harcourt collapsed. My father's health was failing, my savings had finished, and I was sleeping in my mother's parlour. That was when Ifeoma carried me.

Ifeoma and I met during NYSC in Delta, and by that year she was the only person who still picked my calls. She would send me 20,000 naira on Fridays and pretend it was for data. She knew I had stopped eating well. She would come to the house with a cooler of egusi soup and sit with me while I cried about work, about my father, about nothing. She never made me feel small.

The man was Emeka. Tall, loud, always smelling of expensive perfume, always talking about contracts. He was the one who introduced me to the business that later swallowed my money. Ifeoma was there when I lost everything. She held me that night. She said, "God will restore you."

Two years later, she called me to say she was getting married. To Emeka.

I went to the wedding in Warri. I wore a gold aso ebi that cost me 35,000 naira I did not have. I smiled in every picture. I danced when they called my name. But when the pastor asked if anyone had anything against the union, I looked at the floor and I kept quiet.

That is the part I still carry. Not that she chose him. But that I was too afraid to tell her what he did to me before she ever met him. I have not spoken to her in three years. The friendship ended, but the silence is the wound.

Lesson: If you know something, say it before the aso ebi is sewn. Silence is not peace. Sometimes it is just fear wearing a nice dress.