My husband sent me a message early in the morning. He said, “If you think getting pregnant for a married man is a good idea, then I don’t know what I should think of you.”

I read the message over and over again, trying to make sense of it. And then he deleted the message right when I was still reading it. He texted, “Sorry, it’s not yours.”

He was in the toilet while texting. I went straight to the toilet and pushed it open. He was wearing his boxer shorts and seated on the toilet seat, texting. “I’m not pregnant for a married man, so who’s that message for?”

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He started fumbling, and then he said it was an accident. “I know it’s an accident, but if it wasn’t, who would have received this message?” Then he got up, screamed at me and tried making his way out of the toilet. I blocked him. “No, you’re not going to use anger to escape. Who did you get pregnant?”

He pushed me out of the door and walked away. “I said it’s not you I’m sending the message to. That ends it. Why do you want to know who it’s for?”

He quickly bathed, dressed up and left for work. In the afternoon, he texted to apologise for his behaviour and said the message was for a colleague in the office who he knew was dating a married man. The colleague texted him that she was pregnant and wanted to keep it. He tried to respond, and the message got to me.

After reading his message, I said to myself, “Clever, but this won’t get me.”

When he came home, I asked him to show me the chat between him and his colleague, and he said it was supposed to be a secret between them, so he had deleted the messages. Again, we argued. He played the victim and accused me of not trusting him as a husband. “Why are we even married if you don’t trust me this much?”

I decided I would let things slide and watch him. I apologised for not trusting him and even promised him I would do better and trust him more. He would close from work and come home very late. He would tell me something came up. He wouldn’t eat his food, and he wouldn’t talk to me or the kids. He would bathe and go to sleep.

I would help the kids with their homework, watch them bathe and go to sleep. I would watch some TV, go to bed late and still meet my husband lying there, unable to sleep. He would pretend to be sleeping, but I’ve been sleeping next to him for the past ten years, so I know when he’s actually sleeping and when he’s pretending to.

On weekends when he did not go to work, he would sit quietly and look into nothingness for a very long time and sometimes even talk to himself. I would ask him if he was okay, and he would force a smile. So one night, while he was tossing and turning in bed, I asked him, “She still doesn’t want to abort the baby?”

He unconsciously answered, “Yes,” and then quickly changed his answer and asked me what I was talking about. I said, “Your colleague. Has she been able to resolve the pregnancy with the married man?” He retorted, “I don’t know.” And then he turned away from me and pulled his cloth over his head. When the Bible said there’s no sleep for the wicked, it didn’t lie.

My husband was always on the phone, fighting someone or speaking in low tones. He called me Belinda one day. I asked him, “Is that her name? The colleague who got pregnant for a married man?” He chuckled and walked away.

I tried every night to go through his phone. His phone was always tucked under the pillow, and because he didn’t sleep at night, it was very difficult for me to reach it and even try. He would go to the bathroom with his phone. Even when he was charging it at night, it was under his pillow while it charged.

I went around asking questions. I was acting calm in the house, but deep down, I was under fire. I pleaded with some of his friends to find out the truth and tell me, but you know bro code. They’ll watch their friends burn in hell rather than take water to quench the hellfire. I didn’t get any information from them. The months went by slowly. I couldn’t stand his quick temper and the fact that he wouldn’t give the things he gave freely previously.

Housekeeping money became a problem. The kids’ fees became split and shared, where he paid half and waited until the kids were sacked from school before I was pushed to pay the other half. I spoke to his parents about it and told them my suspicion. His mom swore she didn’t know anything about that and didn’t even believe her son would do that. His dad told me he would speak to him and find out. Nothing came out of it.

I took the whole thing as my cross to carry until one day, I saw a TikTok video on my FYP. There was a naming ceremony, but the man standing beside the mother looked familiar. I paused the video and went through the faces one after the other. My husband was the man in white. His mother was there, and one of his uncles I knew very well was also present.

I saved the video and sent it to him while we were in the house togeher. I said, “Your colleague who got pregnant for a married man had a naming ceremony, and you didn’t tell me?”

I was looking at him stare at his phone for several seconds, and then he lifted his head to look at me. I asked, “Or that’s not you in the video? Your mom swore you couldn’t get another woman pregnant, so why is she at the naming ceremony of a woman you got pregnant?”

He brushed his face with his palms several times without having an answer to my question. “We have three kids. You’re the same man who said three are plenty. If I listened to you, we would have aborted the third child, but look at you. What changed?”

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No answer. He sat there as if he’d lost his power to be a man. I promised him I wasn’t going to leave the marriage, but he would leave. As I write this, I haven’t seen him in three days. I don’t know where he is, and I haven’t called to check up on him. He pays for everything down to a T in this house.

I promised him I would never contribute a penny to make things lighter for him. You see him today, and he looks like a fifty-year-old man, but he’s only thirty-nine. The other lady doesn’t spare him at all. She’s taken him to court after the police station didn’t work. I don’t care. We both have to get what we have to get.

—Catherine

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