WHEN LOVE TURNED BRUISES Episode 5( final)

I did not scream when they told me Kunle was dead.

I sat on the floor of the hospital corridor with blood still on my hands and stared at the wall like it might explain what I had done. Nurses moved around me. Police officers spoke, but their words floated past my ears without meaning. All I could hear was the echo of our last fight the crash, the shout, the terrible sound of the bottle meeting flesh.

I kept saying his name.

They handcuffed me gently, as if kindness could undo what had already happened. On the way to the station, I watched the city lights blur through the window and wondered how life could continue moving when mine had completely stopped.

During interrogation, they asked about our marriage. I told them the truth. About the fights. The slaps. The insults. The fear. The rage. I spoke calmly, like I was telling someone else’s story. But no matter how much pain I described, it didn’t bring Kunle back. It didn’t erase the fact that my hands were the last ones to touch him while he was alive.

The court called it manslaughter.

I called it the end of everything I once hoped for.

Prison is quieter than my marriage ever was. The walls don’t shout. The doors don’t insult me. At night, when the lights go out, I lie on my thin mattress and listen to my own breathing. That silence used to scare me. Now it’s all I have.

Sometimes, I remember Kunle before the anger. Before the insults. Before the bruises had names. I remember the man who once smiled at me like I was the only woman in the world. That memory hurts more than the beatings ever did.

Other times, I remember myself. The woman I was before I learned to fight every day. Before shouting became my normal. Before rage felt safer than love.

I ask myself the same question every night: Why didn’t I leave?

There is no simple answer. Fear. Hope. Shame. Love twisted into something unrecognizable. By the time I understood that our marriage was already dead, I had stayed long enough to die with it.

Kunle is buried.

I am alive but trapped in a different kind of grave.

If this story ever reaches another woman who fights daily with the man she calls her husband, let my life be a warning. Love should not feel like a battlefield. Marriage should not sound like war. The moment violence enters, the ending has already begun.

I didn’t walk away when I still could.

Now, all I have left is regret and a silence that will last longer than any sentence the court could give me.