My ex-wife came to see our son. She ended up staying the night. I let her sleep on the couch. After midnight, I heard something I wasn’t supposed to hear.

By morning, the wall I’d spent two years building had a crack in it I couldn’t explain away.

My name is Emeka Okafor. I’m thirty-eight years old, and I live in a three-bedroom house tucked at the end of a quiet close in Surulere, Lagos, roughly twenty minutes west of the Island.

The house is far too large for just me and a seven-year-old boy, but I bought it back when my marriage still existed and we believed in the life we were planning together.

Selling it has never felt possible. Some mornings I tell myself the reason is practical — the school district is great and the backyard is perfect for a trampoline. Other mornings I admit the truth is more complicated than that.

My son’s name is Ekenem. We call him Eke for short. He’s seven, missing a couple of front teeth, completely obsessed with dinosaurs and the Super Eagles, and without question the best thing that has ever happened to me.

He inherited his mother’s laugh — the kind that begins quietly before exploding and filling an entire room — and every time I hear it drifting from the backyard or the living room, something shifts inside my chest in a way I still don’t have the vocabulary to explain.

His mother’s name is Adanna.

We were married for six years. We met in our late twenties at a professional conference in Victoria Island — she worked in marketing, and I was managing IT projects.

We ended up seated at the same table during a networking dinner and kept talking long after the hotel staff started stacking chairs around us.

We dated for about eighteen months. I proposed one Saturday morning at Lekki Conservation Centre after planning the moment down to the minute.

We married in a small ceremony in Ikeja with about sixty guests and a highlife band that played until late.