Every week, Naijaonpoint spotlights the unfiltered stories of women navigating life, love, identity and everything in between.
What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.
The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Adaeze*, a 35-year-old events planner who splits her time between the UK and Nigeria. She grew up with two younger brothers and a girl she considered her sister for almost 20 years. Today, that woman is engaged to her father.
My name is Adaeze. I am 35. I plan events for a living, mostly in the UK, but I also work across Nigeria and West Africa. Port Harcourt is where I am from, but the UK is where I live now and have lived for most of my adult life.
I studied International Business at university. When I graduated, I went straight into my master’s, and after that, I worked in business consulting for a couple of years. Eventually, I realised I was very good at organising people, spaces, and experiences, and that I enjoyed it more than everything else I did, even finance and the payoff. So I transitioned into events. I built my clientele slowly, mostly word of mouth at first, then corporate clients, then weddings, then larger productions. Now I do both.
I have two younger brothers, twins. I lost my mother when I was 11, and they were 4. In many ways, I became their mother before I was ever an adult.
My father was a different man when my mother was alive. He was kinder and more present. After she died, he became someone we had to learn all over again, and what we learned was not easy. He grew hard. He was emotionally unavailable, and it hurt. Sometimes he would get physical when he dealt with us, especially when he was frustrated or angry. He was not a monster, but he was not the same man. Grief does strange things to people, and I was 11 and trying to understand it while also trying to make sure my four-year-old brothers were fed and okay.
We moved a few times after she died. He was restless, like someone who could not outrun what was inside them. Eventually, we settled in one of his apartment blocks. He is in real estate and has other business interests. That is where we stayed, and that is where I met her.
Someone I have called my friend for many years. Let’s call her Erica*. I was turning 13. My father and some family friends had invited the neighbours for my birthday, and she was there. She was two years younger than me, so she was 11, and she lived with her parents.
From there, things moved the way friendships between children move. We started spending time together outside, visiting each other, and playing. Before long, we were inseparable. We did not go to the same school because her family did not have the same kind of money my father had, but that did not matter to either of us. I had no sister. She had no sister. We became each other’s borrowed one. Eventually, my father started including her whenever he was taking us somewhere. Her mother sometimes began looking after my brothers, too. She became my actual sister.
When I was 15, she lost her father. I was there for her through that grief, completely and without question. During that period, I noticed her mother speaking to my father frequently. Long conversations on the phone, long conversations when they saw each other. I thought nothing of it. Her mother was a widow now, and my father had resources and influence. He was helping her navigate things. That made sense to me.
Then, within a few months, my father transferred Erica to my school. I was thrilled. My best friend would now be at the same school as me, even if we were not in the same class. She started staying at ours more and more until eventually she was practically living with us. She would sometimes go home to her mother, but our house was as much hers as it was ours. My father put her on an allowance. He bought her things. He made sure she had what she needed. At the time, I thought it was an act of generosity. I thought it was him doing what good people do for children who need looking after.
Erica was warm when she wanted to be. She could be very funny and very magnetic. But as she got older, she always gravitated towards men with money, even when those men were clearly dangerous or unkind to her. Yahoo boys, men who already had wives or girlfriends, men who left marks on her in different ways. It never ended well. I was always there when it ended. She had three abortions during the years of our friendship, and I was present for every single one. It happened during her late teens and our early to mid twenties. I did not judge her, I was just there because that is what sisters do.
My father continued to support her financially well into adulthood. Beyond the allowance from when we were teenagers, he bought her a car and put it in her name. She wanted for nothing from him, and yet she was always chasing more from places that hurt her. I used to worry about her constantly. Especially the first time I had to leave Nigeria for university in the UK.
At 18, after I got my admission. I went, I called home regularly, I FaceTimed my brothers, my father, and her. My father continued taking care of me financially throughout university. In my third year, he came to the UK on holiday with all of them, including Erica and her mother. He paid for everything. Flights, accommodation, activities. They were family, so at this point, it was lowkey expected.
We stayed close through all of it. Her messy relationships, my university stress, her eventually getting into a private university in Nigeria, me finishing my degree and going straight into my master’s. Years passed. By 26, I was done with all of it. I was established, employed, and building. Then I went back to Nigeria for my NYSC.
My father asked me to. He wanted me to do my service year in Nigeria, and honestly, a part of me wanted to come back anyway. So I did.
And that was the first time I noticed something had shifted with Erica. She was cold towards me, like she had never been before. Also sharp and guarded. It was like I had done something, and she was still deciding whether to forgive me and had not told me what it was.
Looking back now, I can see exactly what it was. But at 26, coming home after years away, I just saw my best friend acting strangely, and I did not know why.
Small things that accumulated. She would borrow my car and return it with an empty tank, never refilling it. It sounds minor, but the casualness of it and how frequent it was bothered me. She would tell my father things out of context, things I had shared with her in confidence, and he would bring them up in ways that put me on the defensive with him. There was one evening when I invited her to dinner with a group of her friends and co-workers, mostly men, clearly wealthy, and she spent the whole night performing for the table to get attention and in a way that made me look small. From cutting remarks to laughter at my expense. It was nothing you could easily confront, but all of it was deliberate. I was humiliated and sad because I could see who she was becoming with these people, and it worried me.
I pulled her aside afterwards and told her what I observed. She cried. She said she had missed me so deeply while I was away, and when I came back, she felt a distance between us she did not know how to close, and it surfaced as ugliness. She was jealous, she said. Insecure about where she stood in my life now that I had built a whole world that did not include her. She said it would never happen again.
I believed her. She was my sister. You believe your sister.
On the surface, but I started noticing other things. My father was different when she was around. His laughter came more easily. His eyes were brighter. He was physically warmer with her in small ways, a hand on her shoulder, leaning in when she spoke, giving her his full attention in a way he did not give to much else. I noticed all of it, and I told myself a story about it that made sense to me. She had been in our lives since she was 11. He was fond of her. Of course he was. He had practically helped raise her. That is what I told myself.
After NYSC, I went back to the UK.
The year after, my brothers started university in the UK and came to join me. Everything was moving forward. I met the man I would eventually marry after three years of building something. We all went to Nigeria for the introduction and the traditional wedding. Both families had weeks of celebration, a full and joyful time.
Erica was my maid of honour.
She was present. She performed the duties. She was cordial when she needed to be, but she was distant. I kept noticing. I caught her looking at me throughout that week with this expression I could not read, heavy and complicated, and every time I asked her directly if she was okay, she would say yes, congratulate me, and change the subject.
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We flew back to the UK and had the white wedding a few weeks later. She did not smile once. Not when I walked in, not during the vows, not during the reception. She did not clap, did not get up to dance, did not celebrate me. She sat with this expression on her face, as if she were attending to something painful, and at some point she stopped being present altogether. Just slipped away from her duties and left me to manage without her.
If it were not for my brothers, my closest friends, my sister-in-law, and a college friend who had been with me through years in the UK, I would have been completely adrift on my own wedding day. That friend stepped into the maid of honour role without being asked and held everything together. She is one of the most important people in my life to this day.
What I felt watching my sister sit cold and absent at my wedding is not something I have fully found words for. I had done nothing to her. I had given her everything I had. And she could not even pretend to be happy for me for one day.
She never explained and never apologised. She and the people who had travelled with her left a few days later, and that was effectively the end of our direct contact.
Almost two years. I tried for the first several months. From messages to calls, checking in through mutual people. Nothing. Eventually, I stopped reaching. My brothers were furious with her and had been trying to tell me things for years, things they had noticed when I was away at university, behaviours and moments between her and my father that had made them deeply uncomfortable. I had not listened.
My father came to visit, and he brought her with him. After two years of silence, she appeared at my front door with my father. She was carrying a baby.
I stood in my kitchen watching my father with that child. Watching how he held her, the way he looked at her, the way he spoke to her. And she was watching me watch him. And she smiled.
Everything that I had refused to understand for years arrived all at once. Every warm look and bright eye I had noticed and explained away. Every cold shoulder and heavy stare at my wedding. Every strange shift in behaviour from the moment I came home for NYSC. Everything my brothers had tried to tell me. It all became one clear and terrible picture in the space of a moment.
I didn’t know when I charged, grabbing her by the neck.
I remember the shouting and people trying to pull me off her, and my own voice somewhere in the noise and everything we had ever been to each other flashing through me. Every birthday, every abortion I had held her through, every secret she had kept of mine, every secret she had kept from me. And she was laughing through all of it. While I was losing my mind, she was just laughing.
I let her go and turned to my father.
I told him to take her and find a hotel for the rest of their stay. I told him her name was never to be spoken in my home again. I asked him directly and clearly whether he had been doing this while she was a child. While she was living in his house. While she was my underage friend whom he had clothed, schooled and fed. A girl younger than his own eldest child.
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