"Agnes, wake up." I said shaking her awake. Though I am reluctant to, I had no choice. She was a new resident in the shelter. She had lost her husband and kids in a car accident, and her sister thought it would be better for her to recuperate in a shelter full of women. "Come and take your bath."

The young woman grumbled and turned as her sleepy amber eyes opened and her lashes fluttered open and close a few times. My heart logged in my throat because I knew what was coming next. She rolled to the middle of the bed and traced the other other side of the bed murmuring softly, as though speaking to her lover.

I cringed as awareness dawned on her and she shot up on the bed in shock. Horror flooded her eyes as she stared around, her glance flitting over me then back to me. She jerked the blanket off her body and stared at me as though she did not know where she was. I knew the exact moment that her reality dawned upon her. Her pupils dilated and tears simmered in her eyes.  "It... I". She began with trembling lips but she said no more as sobs tore out of her lips, her entire body wracking with its intensity. She made a long, deafening sound which I was sure almost everyone in the shelter heard but I made no move to comfort her. I was accustomed to death and grief; to me it was an everyday thing. Maybe that's why the other women left the care of new residents to me.

She cried until she choked but I paid her no mind as I removed her clothes and helped her into the bathtub where I washed her body hoping that the cold water would calm her. Her throat closed and no more sound came out. And when I was sure that her grief had eased she began to weep all over again. She was still weeping when I lifted her out of the bathtub, her petite and weightless body lacked the ability to oppose my lifting her.

Even as I dressed and fed her, tears were still running down her face. Although I felt like slapping her when she vomited the food on the new blanket, I just removed the soiled blanket, added a sleeping pill to a glass of warm milk and fed her all over again. Thankfully, the therapist would be here soon and I can leave to my own room to wash off the stench of her vomit off my body.

Though sleepy, she was still crying when I left her.  If that was what grief was, I wanted no part of it. For exactly eight years and two months, I haven't cried. The therapist I saw when I first came here said I was in shock, that's why I didn't shed a tear when Usman died. But deep down I knew it was because I had lost connection with sorrow, we had severed our last ties the day that Usman died and then I crushed it under my foot.

The two pages I had scribbled down to Beatrice for the past one week and the account books kept staring at me as I slumped onto the chair in my room and I chose the letter over my work. I wrote until I could no longer write. I told Beatrice of all that has happened to me but I felt none of it. It was as though I was writing about a third party.

I sealed the finished letter in an envelope and gave it to one of the messengers in the shelter who would have it couriered to Lagos.

I quietly stood up and then lay down on the bed knowing that it was fruitless for me to try to do any work right now. My swollen wrists hurt too much from writing the twelve pages of that letter.

Isah and I had been dating for a year when he asked me to marry him. How romantic his proposal had been! He took me to my favourite confectionery joint, which also served ice cream and peppered chicken. I was busy devouring my ice cream when he placed in front of me, a beautiful rosebud with a diamond ring –which sparkled as it caught the light – nestled in its heart. He didn't fall on his knees but four waiters came out, with each holding a placard with just a word written on each. The four placards held the words "Will you marry me?" and I nodded unable to voice my response because my throat was clogged with tears. The people around clapped and congratulated us as he put the ring on my finger and then went back to their mini-meals.

Isah Yusuf Al-Razam had just played out the proposal scene of my favourite book, which I had told him about six months back. What more could I ask for?

His surprise for the day wasn't finished because as soon as we left the confectionery joint, he drove to a beautiful neighbourhood and stopped at an equally beautiful house. It was the house he had just finished building for us, totally undecorated and he signed a blank check which he handed over to me. I could design the house anyway I wanted, except with the colour pink and I laughed at his silly clause.

Of course I couldn't just keep quiet, so I told him about Ayyub and promised to find a way to get out of my previous engagement. My Isah wasn't angry. "I would wait for you even if it were for a thousand years," was his response. The kiss which he pressed onto my lips as he dropped me in the front of the school hostel sent shards of pleasure sparking down my spine. LCR – Love, chemistry, romance – was there for the world to see. My perfect man.

I think Ramlah was even more excited than I was about the engagement, we had been friends since our year one and now we were eager to be sisters. Together, Ramah and I fixed a date so that Isah could come and pick me up from the hostel to meet his parents. The day came sooner than I expected.

Though I was already overexcited and nervous, my heartbeat galloped and thudded as his unfolded his long length from his car and stepped down to help me into the passenger seat.

Despite my apprehension, his parents and siblings loved me on sight. His mother tried to persuade me to spend the night in her house and I declined telling her that I hadn't informed my parents that I'd be spending the night. The beautiful Arab woman informed me that Isah had two mothers because she had been sick and unable to breastfeed him after his birth, so we still had to visit his foster mother and seek her approval. A smile curved her lips when Isah informed her that Ramlah's mother was already aware.

"Momma."

I swung towards the door at the soft call and then realised that I had been staring off into the space while relieving my past. "Fathia. As salamu alayki."

"Wa alayki salam, momma." Fathia, Ayyub's daughter smiled. She walked inside daintily, holding 'baby'.

'Baby' is the seven year old daughter of Sylvia, the woman in the room next to mine. We all called her baby since none of us knew her real name. Someone should give her a name really soon though.

The shelter was mainly what one would call a grief shelter since it mostly admitted bereaved women, to help them deal with their loss. But it was hard for even the most qualified of all grief counsellors to help someone who had lost the ability to hear or speak and wasn't willing to write. Quite frankly I am not sure she was still mentally okay.

Sylvia had been admitted into the shelter five years ago. The woman had lost her three other children to an automobile accident. A trailer had hit the children on a motorcycle, crushing their bodies until it was beyond recognition. She had cried until she lost her voice permanently, the psychological trauma had made her lose her hearing.

Her husband hadn't fared any better, he ran mad the instant he heard the news. Perhaps her grief might not have been so acute had she not being a witness to the accident. She had stood only a few feet away and saw the trailer crushed her hope. And every day since she has been here, she continued to cry soundlessly and scream at night. I shudder to even think of what she must be going through.

Her only surviving child 'baby' was taken away from her two weeks after her arrival because of her tendency to fiddle with sharp objects and she was being raised by another woman who had lost her child. 'Baby' was a source of joy to the other woman.

"Fathia, to what do I owe the pleasure of being visited twice in two days?" I asked as she enveloped me in an embrace and smiled impishly at me.

"I came to aid Baba's campaign." She sat on the bed next to me and placed 'baby' in her lap. "The man is too old to be in that house all alone. And I'm starting school in a few weeks. Did I tell you I got admitted? I'm going to be a medical doctor."

She was a more feminine version of her face and her face danced with emotions as she bounced on the bed.

"Congrats, my darling." I replied genuinely happy for her. "Which school?"

"The uni here". She rolled her eyes. "I can't bear to be far away from Baba knowing that he is alone. But if you get married to him, then I and my siblings won't have to worry so much."

I just laughed and told her that it was between I and her dad but her next words moved me which was pretty startling for a woman whose emotions were dead.

"Would it be so bad being married to him? Do you have no feelings for him? You have been in our lives for the past seven years. Would it be so bad for you to give us the right to call you mother? Do you think us so unlovable that you cannot even contemplate being our mother? My mother?" She asked solemnly with all the previous trace of joviality vanishing from her face.

"Oh Fathia." I sighed. “It is not so. I love all of you.”

“Then why?”

I resisted the urge to tell her she would not understand because I knew she would if I told her of what was eating me from the inside. Instead I told her I would pray about it and get back to her.

"Thank you." She kissed my cheek and brought out a box from her bag. "Ya Majiidah and Ya Mazeedah asked me to give you this and Ya Nabeelah told me to tell you that she is pregnant again." Just like that, she was back to her jovial self.

"So much good news. Alhamdullilah."

"And you haven’t even heard it all. Ya Hassan and Ya Hussain will be coming back to Nigeria next week and Ya Zakir is finally bringing the woman he has been hiding, home to dad..." She rattled on about her older ones, updating me on everything that has been happening in their lives for the two hours that she stayed with me.

She is the one I was most intimate with out of Ayyub's children since she is the youngest. Ayyub's wife had given him seven children – three male and four female. Of course I would never have even considered marrying Ayyub if she was alive. For years thinking of the word polygamy or rather polygyny – as it really is – makes nausea well up my throat and gives me panic attacks.

It's funny how life uses one's words against one. Everything I had said the day I finally broke my engagement to Ayyub came back to bite me in my behind and it is still eating me alive. If only, I had forgiven my father. If only I hadn't been filled with so much anger, if only... That's all that I am left with. If only.

The first week of the midterm break of my final year in university which I spent at home was a week of battle. I had informed my parents of Isah's proposal and they both forbade the marriage but I was determined to marry the man I loved.

I called a meeting with my parents and Ayyub during the second week of my stay at home and I informed Ayyub of my love for another in front of my parents. They both gasped in anger, perhaps they thought I had relented since I hadn't say a word about it in the past few days.

I stared at my father in the eye, daring him to challenge my choice.

"Why? Why do you take pleasure in disgracing me?" My father shouted on top of his voice, banging his fist against the center table. "I have been nothing but a good father to you. Why do you always do things that would make me angry?"

I stood up to face him. I looked so much like him in appearance but at this moment we were nothing but rivals. His words had burst the dam of the festering thoughts in my mind. "A good father you say. Baba, a good father?” I laughed at his words. “Remember when you travelled abroad, I was so happy that you were back. I ran to hug you, and then in the night you came into the parlour. You gave my brother a bag and my sister a game set. What did you give me? Nothing, Baba! Not even a pencil. And I was just eleven, Baba! I always tried to convince myself that it's because Farouk is your only son but you favoured Zainab too because she is the baby of the house. Where did that leave me, Baba?"

I hit my chest in anger as words continued to burst from my lips. "I begged! For everything that you gave to me, my school fees, my allowances. I had to beg for it while you gave my siblings without thinking twice and without them asking. You faulted me for every fight that I had with them without listening to my explanation. You hit, you insulted, you cheated me father! A good father you say?" I turned to Ayyub. "I do not despise you but because it is this man who brought us together there can never be anything between us."

My head turned on the impact of the slap my mother dealt me with but I did not stop talking to man in front of me. "You oppressed me, Baba and I do not forgive you! Mother might forgive you but I don't. I do not forgive you for every time I had to hide away because you were angry, I do not forgive you for every time you humiliated me in front of our family members trying to prove that I am a bad child, I do not forgive you for everything given to my siblings but not to me. I do not forgive you, Baba!”

“Shut up, Haneefah. Shut up!” My mother shouted and my father stood frozen to the spot by my outburst. I continued despite my mother’s screams.

“For once in your life, do something for me! Let me follow my heart, let me live my life without the shadow of your high-handedness."

"Do you hate me that much?" My father had asked stoically, holding his chest.

"Don't....Haneefah. Haneefah!" My mother cried brokenly.

I looked him in the eye and nodded. "For every time you looked me in the eye and said you hated me thinking it was nothing. I return the favour, I despise you Baba! I really do despise you." I replied with tears in my eyes and ran out of the sitting room.

I sat in my room, refusing to come out. Our house was as silent as a grave yard and even the birds which normally perched on the tree next to my window, crying out melodiously refused to cry for me.

"Tell your man to bring his parents." My father had whispered the next day when he came into my room but I turned my face away from him, looking out the window until I heard him leave my room. "I'm sorry." He whispered as he left.

"Too little, too late, Baba." I whispered back into the silence of my room. If only I had ran after him and begged for forgiveness, apologised for the rashness of my words and accepted his apology. If only I had known that my father was dying, that cancer was eating away at him.

Ayyub told his parents that he was breaking the engagement – taking the blame and his parents came to apologise to my parents for their son's behaviour. But I knew that his father knew the truth when our eyes met and he shook his head. He still hugged my father and left with his wife.

Meanwhile, Isah and I were living in our own bubble of happiness. Our wedding date had been set and preparations had begun. My younger sister, Zainab was to be married a week before me, to a man my father had selected for her. She wanted a small wedding with only family members, but mine would be the grand one.

The first shoe dropped, two weeks before our wedding when Isah was talking about a sickle cell campaign he was involved in and Ramlah teased him about being a sickle cell carrier. It was then that I realised that we hadn't even compared our genotypes. We were both AS, but my ever optimistic and self-assured Isah told me not to worry. Both of his parents were of the AS genotype and none of their three kids had the sickle cell disease although two of them were carriers.

In between Isah's family and my father, I had my dream wedding. Most of Isah's cousin sisters and mine came to help me prepare. The celebration went on for three days and we received lots of gifts from both friends and family.

We went to Dubai for our honeymoon and came back after two weeks only find that my father had died the previous day. I was distraught, angry and hurt, he had had cancer. His colleagues and friends and even my siblings knew but no one told me. The last thing I said to my own father was that I despised him!

My mother refused to talk to me throughout the funeral and even after that, whenever I came into the room my mother would avert her eyes from me. She was more distraught than me and all she kept muttering as tears ran down her face was "To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return".

Two months later I also lost my mother, if there was anything such as dying from heartache then that was what had killed mother. Zaynab refused to say anything to me, she packed mother's things which she wanted, donated the rest to charity and then went back to her husband's house.

Farouk, my older brother, sold everything our parents had: the car, the house and thus our home, our family, our history ceased to exist. All through this, Isah stood by me, consoling me.

And the night after my mother's burial, he settled his hand on my stomach and whispered. "If the baby is a male we will name him Usman for your father and if it's a female we will name her Kafila for your mother. Do not despair my love, I will be your mother and I will be your father, I will take care of you till death separates us and never will you have to share my love with anyone except our children."

And oh! He did take care of me.

~~~~~~~~~~
So here is chapter 2, do not forget to vote and comment.

Thanks for all your feedback on the last chapters. Nothing makes me happier than seeing notifications of your votes and comments.