By Owie Aideyan
Amaka had always believed in forever. Growing up in a quiet town in Anambra, she had watched her parents’ marriage withstand poverty, illness and the passage of time. She thought love was supposed to be unshakable — an anchor. So, when she met Tunde at the university, it felt as though fate had handed her a slice of that same magic.
Tunde was charming without trying. He waited outside her lecture hall with chilled bottles of water, walked her home under drizzling rain and scribbled little notes on yellow sticky pads: “Don’t skip lunch.” “I’m proud of you.” “You are my only sunrise.” By their second year, everybody on campus called them “husband and wife.”
They dreamed out loud together. Amaka wanted to open a wellness centre for women; Tunde wanted to work in finance. He promised her marriage before she turned 25. “You’ll be Mrs. Adewale before you know it,” he would whisper while brushing crumbs off her dress after lunch. She supported him through his NYSC year, through his mother’s illness, even through the long months when he was unemployed. She paid his rent once, lent him her savings twice, and never asked for a receipt.
Her friends warned her gently: “Amaka, don’t lose yourself.” But she smiled. “Tunde is different,” she would say. “We’re building together.”
In 2023, Tunde finally landed a prestigious job in Lagos. He told Amaka they could start planning their wedding. She cried tears of joy, believing their struggle was over. “Everything we prayed for is happening,” she texted him that night. He replied with a single heart emoji.
But the calls began to shrink. The trips home became excuses about “urgent office work.” He stopped asking about her day. Amaka would see him online at 2 a.m. but get no replies to her messages. He started to sound impatient, dismissive. “I’m busy,” he would snap. “Stop acting insecure.”
She blamed herself. Maybe she was too needy. Maybe Lagos was just overwhelming. She told her friends, “It’s the job. It’s temporary. He still loves me.”
One weekend, after yet another week of unanswered calls, she decided to surprise him at his new apartment. She baked his favourite coconut cake, bought a new dress — a soft yellow one he’d once said made her look like sunlight — and boarded a dawn bus to Lagos.
When she arrived, she noticed a strange pair of slippers at his door. Her heart began to hammer. She knocked softly. The door swung open.
Inside, the shock was a physical blow. Tunde was seated at the dining table with another woman — clearly pregnant — wearing the gold wristwatch Amaka had given him at his job interview. The woman looked up, smiled politely and introduced herself as his fiancée.
Amaka stood frozen, the cake box trembling in her hands.
“Tunde,” she whispered, “what is this?”
He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Amaka, I can explain.”
“Explain what?” she said, her voice cracking. “Who is she? What is happening?”
The pregnant woman touched Tunde’s arm possessively. “We’re engaged. Didn’t he tell you?”
Everything blurred after that. Amaka left the cake on the floor and ran down the stairs, feeling as though the walls were closing in. Outside, she sat on the pavement, the noise of the city rushing past her, unable to breathe.
Weeks later, she learned the full story: the pregnant woman was the daughter of Tunde’s boss. They had been engaged for months; her father had secured Tunde’s promotion on the condition of the marriage. All the late nights, the ignored messages, the cold replies — he had been planning a different life.
Amaka’s heartbreak felt like an open wound. She couldn’t sleep. She replayed every conversation, every sacrifice, trying to find the moment she lost him. Her friends sat with her in silence; there were no words big enough for the betrayal.
Slowly, she began to rebuild. She started therapy. She took up jogging in the mornings. She cut contact with Tunde entirely, blocking his number and deleting every photo. She stopped blaming herself. In her journal she wrote: “I was not too much. I was enough. He was too little.”
By 2025, Amaka had launched her own small wellness business and was mentoring young women about self-worth and financial independence. People who met her saw a poised, graceful woman, but she still remembered that girl on the pavement in Lagos — the one holding a coconut cake for a man who had already chosen someone else.
Yet she no longer cried when she remembered. She smiled. Because she realised that heartbreak didn’t just break her; it remade her.
In her first public talk, she told the audience, “Sometimes the person you love most is the lesson you needed most. But when the lesson is done, you rise. You rise, and you become your own sunrise.”
And in the quiet of her heart, Amaka knew she had done just that.
