It was my first time at the church service. Everything felt warm, the songs, the prayers, the faces around me. Except when suddenly I felt a heavy presence on me. You know when someone is watching you; I felt it deep in my skin. I turned to look behind me. A gentleman sat in the far corner, his eyes fixed on me. Every time I looked back, his gaze was waiting.

After church, he walked up to me. He said he wanted to be friends. He asked for my number. I gave it, and then I walked back home. I was newly posted to that community to undergo national service, still finding my way about town and about everyone there. So I welcomed his friendship for companionship and also to help me find my footing in the village.

That’s how we started talking every day and became friends. On several occasions, he cooked and invited me to his home to eat. When he returned from Accra, he brought me gifts. When the water wasn’t flowing, he fetched it himself or sent children from the neighborhood to help. Some days we roamed the town together, talking and laughing until our chests felt like they might burst.

I had a fiancé. We had been dating for three years and some months. We were just ten steps away from walking to the altar. The only thing delaying us was my national service duty. I wanted to finish that before moving to the next thing on the list, marriage. Once, when Danny, my fiancé came visiting, I introduced him to this friend of mine. “Help me thank him, he is the one who’s been helping me.”

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Along the line, I don’t know whether my fiancé felt threatened by my new friend, but he started picking unnecessary fights with me every now and then. It grew serious, so serious that I was pushed to the point where I called my family to let them know I was reconsidering marriage to him. “Stop the marriage process and continue with your life for now,” I told them.

He started insulting me over little things, like the money he sent, as if I was at his mercy. Technically I was, because at that time our allowance was barely coming in.

When my fiancé started misbehaving, and my new friend was giving me all the attention I needed and more. I started paying more attention to him, and feelings began to develop. This time I let them grow.

Quietly, that’s how I placed myself between two men. Two men I loved in equal measure, yet differently.

We didn’t even try to hide it. His family heard of me. His friends knew me by name.

I traveled home for a funeral, and days later when I was supposed to see my period, it left me. I started counting back to the funeral days, and only then did it click that I was pregnant. Danny and I had met and sort of settled our differences, which led to us sleeping together while I was there.

He didn’t want us to terminate it, all because he was a deacon in his church. When I asked him what he wanted us to do, he would just say everything but nothing substantial.

So then I told Yaw. He was happy, jumping at the prospect of being a father. He was ready to involve his family, to have them come see mine immediately to claim the baby.

That was how Yaw ended up becoming a father to my baby.

I was heavily pregnant while serving the nation. I stayed at my duty post until I was almost due for delivery, then I went home to my parents. I walked into the delivery room and returned with a dead baby. It was hard to accept. Knowing that I consciously adhered to every rule in the book regarding pregnancy is what makes it even harder.

I called Yaw to inform him about the baby and he did not take it lightly. His mother called. “How did it happen? Were you alone in the ward?” Plenty of questions, and I had no means of answering them. Their grief was understandable, seeing that they carried the pregnancy with me too. His mother brought food from her home to mine, morning, afternoon, and evening. She bought me maternity wears. Everything I needed to have a smooth pregnancy, they willingly gave me.

A year and months later, my fiancé and I had patched things up and were trying to move to the next level. This year, he wants us to get married. I came out truthfully to Yaw about everything, how I had been playing him and his family. He knows I want to get married this year, and he is not taking it easily. He has gone ahead to inform his family of the sham I committed. Since then, they have not been picking my calls, neither have they been returning my texts. I can’t imagine how they feel. I can’t even put myself in their shoes. I am unworthy.

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If anything is possible under the sun, I would even like them at my wedding. They have been an important part of my life and growth as a human. I am planning to travel and see his mom and tell her my side of the story, woman to woman, and let her judge for herself. Or better still, I may allow sleeping dogs to lie. That is where the problem is coming from. Seeing that his family adored me, and realizing that I had been lying to them all this while.

— Beatrice

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