The evening I first saw her, I was at my friend Abigail’s place just hanging out with a few people. She walked in, phone pressed to her ear, greeted the room with a casual “good evening,” and sat down on her bed like she owned every inch of the space. Something about her stopped me. Her energy, the way she moved, the calm she carried around her like it was hers alone. My eyes followed her the whole time and I knew before I left that room, I needed to know her name.

I made sure Abigail introduced us before I stepped out. I left with her phone number and sent her a text the moment I hit the corridor. We started talking and something just clicked.

I liked her. Her aura. Her peace. After what I had just come out of, a relationship that had left me worn down and second-guessing everything, she felt like relief. And yes, for about a minute, I did the thing where I told myself women were not worth it. That lasted maybe two days before she walked into that room and reminded me that I still had a whole heart to give.

One evening while we were talking, I asked her about her parents.

“Oh, Dad is fine, he is a bit stretched and tired,” she said.

“That is too bad,” I said. Then I asked the question I actually needed the answer to. “So when will you go join him after school?”

She shrugged. “Oh, I love being in Ghana. It is peaceful here, people do not look at me differently because of my colour. It is not anytime soon. Besides, I am still in school.”

I smiled to myself when she said that. She had no idea what that answer meant to me.

She told me more about her father later. That he had left her mum, her, and her sibling when they were thirteen and ten years old and moved to the US. That they had grown up mostly on their own but that he had always been there in his own way, doing his duties, loving them from a distance. He had built a storey building in Berekum where they were from and had several apartments he rented out.

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I sat there nodding and listening, and somewhere between her words I smiled to myself because it hit me that I was dating a whole landlady. But honestly, that did not even register as a big deal to me. I have never been the type to lean on a girlfriend, not even when I probably should. What mattered to me was the kind of person she was.

So I started calling her Madam Landlady, and she ran with it. She would come to me with her tenant stories and I would sit with her and help her think through them. The tenant who refused to clean the restroom when it was her turn and was causing trouble with the others who were tired of covering for her. The tenants who had fallen behind on rent and how to handle that without things going sideways. How to find and onboard new tenants the right way. I was fully invested. Fully there.

We did have one thing to sort out though. I am Adventist and she is Presbyterian. Not because she had anything against Adventists but because her immediate ex had been one. He was a churchgoing, Christlike kind of person from the outside, a childhood friend she had reconnected with after years apart. But he broke her heart on a Saturday, which in her mind made it worse. She felt that he used the sabbath as cover to be distant on weekends, to pull away without having to explain himself. That experience had closed something in her and she had made her decision. All Adventists were the same. Deceitful. Not worth trusting.

I decided to prove otherwise. One evening she told me she missed me while I was at chapel. I walked down to her hostel, held her, looked her in the eyes the way you do when you want someone to feel how real your love is, and then walked back to chapel and looked up at the altar wondering if God had seen that. I felt a little guilty but I needed her to feel safe with me. Her ex had done her damage and I wanted to undo it.

Things were going well. Or so I thought.

Then there was Nana.

His name was saved in her phone with no emoji. Just Nana. The first time he called, she turned into a child caught doing something she should not have been doing. The stuttering, the glancing around. I knew that performance too well. My ex had run the same routine on me. I told myself to let it go. I turned a blind eye.

But then he started calling at odd hours, especially when she was at my place. She explained it away quickly. “It is my friend’s boyfriend. They keep having issues and they call me to help them sort things out. It is nothing.”

I let that sit.

One night my phone got stolen on my way back from an evening class. She had two phones and offered me one of them without hesitating. It felt like one of the most genuinely kind things anyone had done for me in a long time. So I took it, grateful.

She had forgotten what was in that phone.

The first thing I found was a lie about where she went to secondary school. She had told me she was an old girl of Yaa Asantewaa Girls Senior High School, one of those schools with a reputation for producing a certain kind of woman, proper, composed, proud of her name. I found her school application form in the phone. She had attended somewhere else entirely, one of those schools that never gets mentioned, under-resourced, without proper dormitories or infrastructure.

I coughed quietly and kept scrolling.

I found Nana’s messages.

He is not her friend’s boyfriend. They have been together for years. His family knows her. He can call her mother directly when he cannot reach her. They lived together back in their hometown. On the 18th, the day after she left my place, she texted him asking for her upkeep money. She was telling him he had been neglecting her. And buried deeper in those messages was something that stopped my breath. They had gotten pregnant together. And ended it.

They are still together.

I sat with all of that for a long time.

Then I went further. I found videos of her and her mother in what looked like a single room. Old brick walls, peeling green paint, Ghana Must Go bags stacked in a corner, old foam mattresses with no coverings. I stared at those videos and thought about the storey building in Berekum, the apartments for rent, the monthly remittances from abroad. I thought about her father who had since passed, and how she had described the money still coming through even after his death. I thought about how she had told me they were still comfortable, that the safety net was still there.

Then I looked at her mother in those videos.

Her mother’s scarf was old and worn. She did not look like a woman with a rental income. She did not look like a woman who received money every month. And I sat there wondering if any part of what I had been told over all these months was real. If the two phones her daughter carried around campus, one of which she had handed to me with a smile, came from this man she was still with the entire time.

I have gone through every corner of that phone. Every folder. Even the calculator. I have been thorough because I needed to know exactly what I am dealing with.

And what I am dealing with is this: I left one toxic relationship and walked straight into something worse. Every dream we talked about, every thing she said she felt for me, every version of herself she showed me, it was all layered on top of a life she was already living with someone else.

I keep wondering if Abigail knows. I keep wondering if I was the last person in the room to see it.  Did my own friend set me up? Did she watch me fall for someone she knew was lying?

I Left Him Because He Didn’t Help In The Kitchen

We are still technically together. I have not brought any of this up. She messaged me earlier today to say she was going to KFC for a burger. I told her to have fun.

I am just watching now. And I am trying to figure out what comes next, because I genuinely do not know who I have been dating all this time.

There is a saying in Twi that captures exactly where I am right now. Even I am shocked that it applies to me.

—Julius

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