Love over Religion

Two years of silence 4

He turned to face her, and she saw the cost of her request in his eyes. The knowledge that he would father children he could not acknowledge, could not raise, could not love openly. The understanding that his legacy would belong to another man, his blood would answer to another name, his existence would be erased from their lives.

"And if they look like me?" he asked. "If they have my eyes, my skin, my build? He will know."

"He will see what he wants to see. Men see what confirms their power, not what threatens it. And if doubt arises..." She reached for her clothes, produced a small vial from her wrapper. "I have studied. I have prepared. There are ways to explain resemblance, to redirect suspicion, to maintain the fiction."

Sam took the vial, examined it without understanding. "What is this?"

"Insurance. Tools for the performance. I have become an expert in deception, Sam. It is the only skill that keeps me alive."

He set the vial aside. He took her face in his hands, studied her as if searching for the girl she had been, the girl who hummed mathematics and wrote poetry in hidden notebooks. "You have changed," he said.

"I have survived."

"Is it the same thing?"

She did not answer. She could not answer. She kissed him instead, with all the skill she had learned in two years of necessary performance, and he responded with all the hunger of two years of denial, and they used their hour completely, leaving nothing for regret.

She conceived that day. She knew it before her body confirmed it, knew it with the certainty of women who have willed pregnancy into being. She returned to Alhaji Lami's house, to his Tuesday attentions, to her routine of absolute regularity. When she announced her pregnancy, he accepted the news with the satisfaction of a man who believes his management techniques have succeeded.