My wife has a child. When we met, she was on a war path with the father of the child. The guy didn’t send upkeep money so she was always on him, fighting, nagging, threatening to take him to court and all that. Their child was four years old then.

The had a job and had other small businesses on the side that fetched her money. She could take care of the child without breaking a sweat but I felt she was doing all that as a form of punishment to the guy looking at how the breakup happened. I advised her to let it go. “It’s not worth it chasing a man who doesn’t want to do anything for his own child. Let him go. In future, he’ll regret it.”

She loosened up but not entirely. Once in a while, she went chasing him to pay. We dated for two years and got married. By that time, the guy was nowhere to be found. I didn’t hear about him and I didn’t see my wife going after him for child support. In my mind, the ties were broken so I took up the responsibility and treated the child as my own.

Two years after marriage, the baby daddy had an accident. I didn’t hear it from my wife. I asked her if she had heard it and she shook her head. She asked who told me and asked when it happened. A week or so later, the baby daddy died. I didn’t hear the news of his death from my wife. I heard it in the grapevine. Again, I came to the house to inform her.

She went mute all of a sudden. I could see flashes of pain in her demeanor though she was trying hard to hide it. One day, the devil will die and God will be sad. That’s how life is. We may hate people but we don’t wish death upon them. I gave her space to mourn the death of the man she had a baby with.

One week, two weeks, she was still mourning. It got intensive every day. She was on the phone talking to people and would be crying. Immediately she sees me, she would stop and pretend all was well. So I went through her phone. She has two phones. I went through the least used phone and read all the secrets this woman was hiding from me.

She gave her baby daddy GHC60,000 to help him travel abroad. In the messages, the man promised her a lot of things. That when he settles abroad, he would come for their child and also come for her. They’d settle abroad and live as a family and ignore everyone including his family and me.

I wasn’t shocked. I was devastated.

My hands were shaking when I woke her up to ask questions. She lied. She backed the lies with tears. She apologized asking me not to divorce her because of that. She kept saying, “Nothing happened between us. I thought I was helping him for the sake of our child. He would come for her so you and I can have the freedom to start our own life and family. I was doing it for our marriage and not because of him.”

She gave that amount to a man who left his responsibilities for me to take over. I was paying fees and feeding their child while she was in the dark planning an escape.

The marriage came to a stop that day. Currently, we are separated. Elders and church ambassadors are going around trying to bring us together but our marriage, to me, died with her baby daddy. Dead men don’t talk. Dead marriages don’t walk. It’s done.