My period delayed for days. I thought I was pregnant. I told my boyfriend my period had delayed, and he told me nothing was going to happen. The relationship with him hadn’t gone too far for me to get pregnant for him.

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I woke up one morning and realized I had stained my bed. It had arrived quietly while I was asleep. I breathed in deeply and thanked God it wasn’t what I feared, but I decided to play a prank on my boyfriend, so I called him. With a moody voice, I told him, “I’m pregnant. I just checked.”

“Really? How did that happen? I thought you said you were safe,” he asked me, acting like he’d been electrocuted with a live wire. I told him the body acts coy sometimes and it could be that my body lied to me. He went on and on and eventually asked, “So what are we going to do about it?” I responded calmly, “But what do you do when you’re pregnant? Get ready to be a dad. I’m going to keep it.”

A few minutes later, he was in my house. “Why would you do this at this moment of our lives? Don’t you want to marry before having kids? Don’t you want to wear a wedding gown and have a fairytale wedding?”

No matter what he said, I told him I was going to keep it. He called one night when I was about to sleep. He sounded very down when he said there was something he hadn’t told me. I asked, “What is it about? Just talk.”

“It’s not that I don’t want you to bear my child. My first girlfriend did the same thing to me; now she has my child, but we couldn’t marry. Adelaide also did the same to me, thinking that would make me marry her; she has my child, but I didn’t marry her. I want to marry you, so please don’t add to the number.”

I was shocked, but then I thought he was lying to me because I said I was pregnant. I called him a liar and told him I wasn’t going to abort, no matter how many lies he came up with.

He showed me pictures of his first son. He said he was ten years old. He showed me the second one, a girl who was four years old. He showed me photos of their mothers and even their social media pages and asked me if I wanted to end up like them. I responded, “Why didn’t you tell me? No problem, I’ll still have the baby. These women didn’t die, so I won’t die too.”

Some days he acted sweet. Other times he acted like he wanted to take me off the surface of the earth. Another time, he told me his parents hated my tribe so much that when they hear I’m pregnant for him, they might make me suffer spiritually and make the baby die inside me. I laughed at him. I said, “Do your parents know what’s behind me? They should try, and they’ll be the first to die.”

He went soft and caring all of a sudden. “Don’t be stubborn. It won’t help any of us.” He threatened me with becoming a “born one” as if that’s a deadly disease. He threatened he wouldn’t accept responsibility if I tried to push it on him. I told him there’s DNA testing, so he couldn’t run from the truth.

From that point, I knew I no longer had a relationship with him. I’d learned enough and knew his love for me was just a smokescreen to get sex. I was acting hard outwardly, but I was dying inside. He stopped talking to me. He refused to pick my calls for days. I would take a photo of my tummy and send it to him. “See how your baby is growing inside me. She’ll be a girl, I can feel it.”

I sent these types of messages to him every morning just to spoil his day even before it started.

Everything was going very well in our relationship until the fake pregnancy announcement. He didn’t give me any reason to doubt his commitment. Anytime he talked about his future, he had me in it somehow. He had been transferred to this town to work and was working on getting a transfer back to Accra because he didn’t like the Ashanti Region that much. Anytime he talked about going back, he mentioned that he would look for a job for me so I could also join him. The love was good until I decided to play.

Days after not hearing from him, after I’d sent tummy photos to him every morning, thinking he had come to terms with the pregnancy, he came to my place one morning in what he called the final appeal.

He sat across the room wearing a sorry face like he was auditioning to become a repentant monk. He said, “I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness or anything, but look at me like a man who deserves mercy and show me some, I beg you. Let this go for your sake and mine. There are so many reasons we don’t have to keep this.”

“And the reasons are…?” I asked.

Then he dropped the final bomb. He was getting married very soon. He said, “It’s my parents’ plan. I didn’t want to, but we’ve gotten to a point where I have to listen to continue my dad’s legacy.”

I got up and showed him the door. “Get out before it turns dirty around here. Get out!” He responded, “I will, but know that having a child for me will make things worse for you just as it would for me. Think about it.”

It started as a joke for me, but the things it revealed to me made me wonder who I’d been dating all this while. I was like, “What is really happening? Is he also pranking me the way I am pranking him?”

I sent him a text and thanked him for everything. I told him it was better I didn’t see him around me again and wished him all the worst in life ahead. He was still typing when I blocked him. In his head, I was pregnant for him. One afternoon, he came to my place with an elderly man he said was his uncle.

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I told the man, “Does it look like I’m pregnant? It was a joke from the onset, but he revealed too much before I could tell him it’s a joke.” He sat smiling and shaking his head at the same time. I said, “Thank you for everything, but I swear you’ll suffer if you continue living your life this way.”

He’s married but walks around without his wedding ring. His wife works in Nigeria, so they are hardly together. I guess he hasn’t changed much.

—Cassandra

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