From the outside, my marriage looked perfect. People envied me. They said I was lucky to have married Kemi—a woman so beautiful, so calm, so soft-spoken that neighbors called her “angel.” But inside my own home, I was living in a prison of silence.

Since the night of our wedding, Kemi had never allowed me near her. Not once. On our wedding night, she claimed she was tired, too exhausted from the long day. I understood. But the next night, and the next, and the next—it was always the same. Excuses. Headaches. Stomach pain. Tears. She would curl up on the bed, her back turned to me, leaving me cold and confused.

At first, I thought it was shyness. Then I thought it was trauma. I tried to be patient, to love her gently, to wait until she was ready. But weeks turned into months, and months into a year, and nothing changed. We had never shared a bed as husband and wife. She never let me touch her.

I buried my pain in silence because I didn’t want people to laugh at me. How could I tell anyone that my own wife—the woman I paid bride price for, the woman who wore my ring—had never once let me inside her arms? So I smiled outside, but inside, I was dying.

Then, one morning, Kemi came out of the bathroom holding a stick in her hand. Her face pale, her lips trembling. She dropped it on the table before me. Two red lines. Positive.

She was pregnant.

I stared at it, my whole body going numb. Pregnant? Pregnant?! How?! I had never touched her. Never once. My mouth went dry, my head spinning.

“Kemi…” I whispered, my voice shaking. “What is this? What are you trying to say?”

She sat down slowly, her eyes refusing to meet mine. “I… I don’t know how to explain.”

“Explain what?!” I shouted, my voice cracking with pain. “We have never—NEVER—been together as husband and wife. So tell me, whose child is this?”

Tears filled her eyes, but she kept silent. My chest was burning, my fists clenched so tight my knuckles turned white. I wanted to smash something, to break the walls, to scream. But the worst pain wasn’t the betrayal—it was the mystery.

Who?

Who had touched her? When? Where? How could she carry another man’s child under my roof, eating my food, sleeping in my bed, while denying me the right that belonged to me as her husband?

And why—why did she look more afraid than guilty?

That was the beginning of the storm.

Because Kemi’s pregnancy wasn’t just a betrayal. It was a secret darker than I could imagine.

And the father of her child… was closer than I thought.