“Why did you stop?” Eze asked again.

“I lost interest,” Obinna said, and knew that Eze knew it was a lie. “They’re okay, they’ll never be great,” Obinna added quietly.

“What’s that?” Eze asked.

“What Amara told me, years ago, about my poems. I wanted to apply to a poetry workshop, and she was already a young star at the bank. You know I wanted children from the beginning, and she wasn’t sure she wanted them, and even if she did, certainly not right after marriage, and we agreed I would do a temporary vasectomy, but then she suddenly got pregnant. I was so happy. She was less so, because she had a major promotion exam that year that she couldn’t take because she had to go on maternity leave. She was bitter. She told me not to apply to the poetry workshop. Your poems are okay, they’ll never be great.”

Eze was looking at him with liquid eyes. “And you believed her.”

Obinna shrugged. “Maybe my poetry wasn’t meant to be.”

“I don’t understand,” Eze said.

I don’t understand was also what Eze said when Obinna decided to marry Amara, just months after they met at a party the year after they graduated from university. Obinna and Eze were in a corner, watching the dance floor, and Amara walked up to them, a pretty and self-possessed woman, to ask Obinna to dance. At first, Obinna was surprised, because he had naturally assumed that the gorgeous woman was coming for Eze and not for him, because Amara and Eze seemed a more natural fit. But she came for him, and they danced and laughed, and her breath was smoke-tinged when she leaned in to kiss him. With Amara, he felt emotions he thought only possible in poems. He spoke about marriage a few weeks later, terrified that he might lose her. I don’t understand, Eze kept saying. I don’t understand. You are supposed to live your life before getting tied down by marriage. And Obinna told him, You have never really been in love.

“You said that when I decided to marry Amara,” Obinna said. “You kept saying, I don’t understand.”

“You were supposed to become a great poet, not get married a year after graduation.”

“You said you would never marry,” Obinna said.

“I didn’t.” Eze sounded irritated.

“But you want to,” Obinna said, and then wished he hadn’t. “I’m sorry, Eze, that was petty of me.”

Eze shrugged. “My eyes are closing on their own. We better go to sleep.”

Amara came home after midnight, and said she had to go to Abuja in the morning, and would stay overnight, because something had come up at the headquarters that required her presence. Obinna said nothing. He turned over and closed his eyes but could not sleep for hours.