I Brought a Woman to My House for One Night. My Wife Never Found Out. I Still Feel It.

2009. My wife had gone to her mother in Aba for two weeks. I was still a senior registrar then, working late on a land matter that had dragged for years. One of the clerks, a young man who liked to talk, introduced me to a woman at a beer parlour off Allen Avenue. I did not plan it. But I did not say no either.

I brought her to my house. The house my wife and I built together. She sat on the same chair my wife sits on to watch her 7pm news. We were together for maybe two hours. Then I gave her ₦15,000 and she left. ₦15,000 in 2009 was not small money. I told myself it was just money, that it meant nothing.

The next morning, I washed the bedsheets myself before the house girl came. I stood in that bathroom and looked at my own face in the mirror. Twenty-six years I have been married. I have never told my wife. Some nights she asks why I am quiet and I just say work is heavy. The law says adultery is a ground for divorce. The law does not say what a man should do with the memory.