“You owe my family,” Nnamdi said in a voice cold and sharper than the blade of a sword. “Nkechi our marriage is over and you lot will pay every naira I gave to you”

He wasn’t joking.

I felt the huge weight of his words press down on me. He had always brought up the bride price in arguments, or in fights or in almost every situation like a hammer over my head as if he knew it hurt me.

“Remember what I paid your shameless family for you?” he would say. Every disagreement circled back to money and how he supposedly ‘owned me’. In truth, he had paid my father a fortune. The bride price had been so high that our neighbours talked about it for weeks. Now, after three years or marriage, two children, and countless sleepless nights, he says the marriage is over and wants the bride price back and I don’t know why.

I swallowed hard as I picked my next words. “You want it back?” I asked. “Fine. But you owe me too.”

I handed him a piece of paper and watched him read it line by line. It was a list of my costs: the sleepless nights nursing our children, every tear shed over his moods, every meal I cooked and cleaned up, the weekends I sacrificed, every scar of anxiety, every moment of giving without acknowledgement, and losing my shape, my youth, and my freedom.

Yes, these were the emotional labour no money could repay. At the bottom of the note, in bold letters, I wrote: Payment: Daily, until your debt is settled.

Nnamdi stared at me as disbelief flashed in his eyes. “This… is absurd,” he spat.

“If you say so,” I said. “Or maybe you just paid for the easy parts. You didn’t account for what it truly cost me.”

“Cost you?” he screamed and slapped me. a slap that sent me falling to the other side of the room. it surprised me because he had never raised his hand at me.

“You were nothing before me.” he continued in a tone that sounded more like a hiss.

I clutched my face and caressed the sting from the slap just as my parents and younger sister who were visiting walked into the room. If I was wounded which I wasn’t, thankfully, Nnamdi didn’t care. Instead, he went on a rampage threatening my father. He called him greedy, mad even, and mocked our poor background. My sisters whispered words I couldn’t hear to my father, while my mother shook her head, afraid.

Relief didn’t come. I knew Nnamdi’s power and feared his threats to my family. how could I protect them? We watched him storm out of the house and into the night.

He had tried to assert ownership over me with money soon after the wedding, but no sum of naira could capture the sacrifices I had made. Now I wonder how I can fight him. Can emotional, physical, and personal costs be counted when a marriage ends? What about all I listed in the note? Shouldn’t that matter too?

I don’t have answers, only questions. But I feel I have named the cost and faced the man who tried to claim my life, my labour, and my truth as if they could be bought.