MY MOTHER WARNED ME NOT TO MARRY HIM- I DIDN’T KNOW SHE SAW HIS SHRINE BEFORE I DID

I should have listened the first time my mother said, “This man is not for you.”
She didn’t shout. She didn’t argue. She just looked at me with that tired, defeated expression only mothers carry the one that says they’ve already seen the ending long before the story even begins.

I thought it was just parental overprotectiveness. I told myself she didn’t understand him the way I did. I believed love made me wiser. Instead, it made me blind.

When I met him, he seemed perfect in the quiet, attentive way that melts your guard. He wasn’t rich, but he carried himself like a man who had plans. He always knew exactly what to say when I was upset. He brought me small gifts food, jewelry, things he claimed were “just to make me smile.”

If anyone had told me then that darkness was following those gifts, I would have laughed.

The first sign came a few months before our introduction ceremony. My mother woke me up one night, her wrapper loosely tied, her eyes swollen from crying. She didn’t want him in her house anymore.
When I asked why, she only whispered, “Some spirits walk with him. I don’t like what I’m feeling.”

I thought she was being dramatic. I even got angry how dare she judge a man she barely knew?

So I continued with the relationship behind her back.

It wasn’t until after we married that the cracks began to show.

He became moody. Possessive. Obsessed with controlling where I went, who I spoke to, what I posted online.
At first, he wrapped it in romance “I just love you too much,” he would say. But love shouldn’t feel like walking on thin glass.

The night everything shattered, it was raining heavily. He had left to “handle something important,” and I was alone in the house. The generator went off, so I lit a candle.
That was when I noticed the wardrobe in the guest room slightly open. Something inside glowed faintly like metal catching firelight.

Curiosity pulled me in.

Inside the wardrobe was a small wooden box covered in red cloth. My heart was racing, but my hands moved on their own. I lifted the cloth.

What I saw made my knees weaken.

Inside were photographs my photographs. Not the ones I’d posted online. These were pictures of me sleeping, bathing, cooking, laughing. Pictures I didn’t know existed. Some were burned at the edges. Some had marks drawn across my body with chalk and charcoal.

Under the photos were small items belonging to me my hair strands, my old wrist bead, even the wrapper I lost months earlier.

There were cowries. Red candles. A tiny bowl of something dried and dark.

It was a shrine.

A shrine built with pieces of me.

I screamed and dropped everything. And that was when I noticed it another picture tucked to the side. My mother’s face.
Her eyes were scratched out with a blade.

My blood turned to ice.

He returned while I was still shaking. When he saw the open shrine, he didn’t panic. He didn’t explain. He just stared at me with an expression I had never seen cold, empty, like he’d finally stopped pretending.

“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he said quietly.

I ran. Barefoot. In the rain. I didn’t stop until I reached my mother’s house.

She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t say, “I told you so.”
She simply held me, the way she did when I was a child, and whispered, “Now you understand. I saw it before you did.”

I later learned that months before our wedding, my mother had gone to his family house to greet his relatives. A neighbors’ child had led her to a small hut behind the compound where she saw something she never told me exactly what but she said she felt my name hanging in the air like a sacrifice.

I didn’t know how deeply she feared for me until the day I returned broken.

I’m still recovering.

People say mothers exaggerate. But sometimes, a mother’s spirit sees what our heart refuses to notice.

And sometimes, love isn’t just a mistake it’s a warning we ignored until it almost cost us our soul.