How I Killed Your Father

Bayo (1:21 am):

I love you so much, baby. I’m deeply committed to being yours. There’s no woman for me anywhere else in the world except you. We’re for infinity, Folashade.

Maybe this text I received from Bayo that morning would have been cute if I hadn’t known that he had sent it from the arms of Feyi, my best friend.

I wonder how much longer he had planned to continue with that façade, thinking he was deceiving me.

At least Feyi had started to pretend that I didn’t exist anymore.

In hindsight, they both deserved each other.

Bayo and I met at a wedding two years ago. A wealthy politician's son was getting married to an even wealthier governor's daughter and somehow I got an invite.

The food was mediocre, the drinks were too sweet, and I was not having a great time until this random stranger approached me.

I found him very amusing at first. The way he tried to charm me with his boyish grin and his semi-foreign accent.

He was a good-looking guy, no doubt, but he didn't seem like my type.

Which was exactly why I agreed to go out with him.

The first date led to a second date then to a third date, and then he asked me out.

He was the sweetest guy for the first few months; always doing and saying all the right things. He doted over me like I was the most precious thing in the world.

If I didn't know better, I'd have been completely smitten by him.

As expected, the "spark", if you can call it that, between us eventually began to wane.

Our conversations became forced and we grew more apart, even though we were living together.

It was clear that we had hit rock bottom, but I think we were both too lazy to end the relationship. Or at least, he was.

All of that changed when he started cheating though.

Magically, his devotion returned and he became the sweet, intentional guy that he was when he was initially trying to get me to fall in love with him.

He started to shower me with love, affectionate words and gifts again.

Lots of gifts.

At first, I was taken aback by how sudden and intense his 180-degree change in attitude was.

Some days I found it funny. Some days it was too suspicious.

However, I was everything but flattered.

Bayo reminded me of how Mama would steal money from Papa’s wardrobe when I was a child, and then welcome him home with food and sweet name-calling when he came back from work.

Papa would be too fed and elated to realise his money was missing.

Then after a few days, when he finally did, Mama would have spent all of the money and there would be nothing he could do about it.

Then they would revert to their usual custom of shouting and raining curses on each other.

Sometimes he would hit her repeatedly till she fell to the ground, groaning in pain.

"Men are very useless creatures, Sade!" Mama would tell me in tears after Papa had stormed angrily out of the house. "They are liars by nature, never trust a man o, my beautiful daughter."

She said this to me more times than I could count and yet she would fall back into Papa's arms once he offered the weakest apology or brought home the barest minimum gift.

I never understood her actions, but as I got older, I realised how just right her words were.

I didn’t even cry the day Papa fell, cracked his skull and died on the bathroom floor.

If you’re wondering how I found out that Bayo was cheating on me, it was the idiot who told me himself.

I had been awake beside him that night, mentally planning how to spend the sudden 500k he had sent to me, when I heard him mutter Feyi’s name in his sleep, repeatedly saying how much he loved her.

They had been going out for about four months by then.

The next morning while he was bathing, I went through his phone and well the rest, as they say, is history.

I think the part that annoyed me the most was that he did not even have the decency to cheat on me properly.

He was too sloppy and he was always overcompensating, buying a new gift or sending me money every time his guilty conscience got the best of him.

Not that I ever complained sha.

I saved every Naira he sent and sold all the expensive gifts.

I had been thinking long-term for too long and I was irritated by how easy he was making it.

Part of me had hoped for a challenge this time.

You see, I think Bayo actually loved me, he was just a stupid fool who could not control his urges.

It was embarrassing.

He was everything I tried to avoid in men.

From the first time we started going out, I knew that I was dating way below my Intelligence and Emotional quotient.

But in all honesty, fair play to him, I never thought he had it in him to cheat.

Or at least, cheat with so little persuasion.

It’s not that Bayo was not brilliant or emotionally aware, he was just ignorant.

Ignorant of so many things.

Like the fact that a woman like me would have never settled for him in the first place.

If I wasn’t aware of the millions in his account and the fact that he was the heir to the biggest Insurance firm in West Africa, I would not have paid any attention to him.

I wouldn't even have bothered to blackmail my way into the wedding reception so I could meet him in the first place.

The fact that he always thought that he stole my heart and that I fell for him used to make me laugh.

Bayo also didn’t know that Feyi was just like me. She would have never settled for him either.

She was even disgusted by the idea of snooping around with him when I first suggested it.

I didn't like it either, it was too reckless, but too much time had passed and I was starting to get sick of my "relationship" with Bayo.

I desperately needed the out.

"Just long enough for us to get the things we need, then we'll leave him alone," was what I told her.

Luckily, she saw the genius in my plan and went along with it.

My best girl that.

I had half expected the plan to fail.

Part of me thought, maybe even hoped, that he would remain loyal to me.

But alas, a man is a man.

If Bayo had any ounce of common sense, he would have known that it was suspicious for the girl he was cheating with to constantly encourage him to shower his girlfriend with gifts and money.

Especially since he knew that they were very close friends.

Like I said, he was an ignorant fool.

One that didn't know many things.

He didn't know how much I hate men.

He didn’t know that I had stopped taking my regular contraceptives a long time ago.

He didn’t know that I was already a few weeks pregnant with my baby before that night happened.

He didn’t know that Feyi inviting him over that night was a brilliant stroke of genius by yours truly.

He didn’t know that I had to travel for three hours to and fro to the remote town that had the filling station where I bought the gallons of fuel.

He didn't know that I paid the clerk with cash.

He didn't know that I was entering Feyi's house when his text came in.

He didn’t know how much I cringed at the sounds he made from her room, while I emptied the cans of petrol around the house.

He didn’t know the pack of matches I bought was 50 Naira.

He didn’t know that I was the one who locked the doors of the house from outside.

He didn’t know that in my original plan, Feyi was never supposed to die with him.

I'm also sure he didn’t know that human skin generally burns at temperatures above 44°C.

But I’m very sure he felt it.

I still remember how loud their screams were.

It was exhilarating.

Especially Feyi’s. My sweet girl.

Some days I think that I made a mistake, burning my best friend of sixteen years to death.

But every time I do, I just remember her tendency to always run her mouth and I’m appeased.

She would have ruined the whole thing and gotten us caught eventually.

If Feyi hadn’t let it slip to Bayo that I was checking his phone, she would probably still be alive today.

She had started to become distant and I feared that she was getting too sympathetic towards him.

I just didn't trust her again

She was ignorant in her own ways too.

I wonder her reaction when she realised that her house was burning.

She would have known that it was me.

She probably had that look in her eyes as she screamed and died.

The same look Papa had when I pushed him down on the wet bathroom tiles when I was twelve years old.

That look of fear and shock.

Betrayal too, maybe.

The police had conducted their investigation.

It was Arson, obviously.

But by who?

It couldn’t have been me.

I was in Abuja that same day, attending a women’s empowerment conference.

At least that’s what the pictures and receipts I gave the police said.

They had tracked my phone too and it confirmed my location at the time of their death.

I thank God that I had the last-minute sense to buy and send a new phone with my sim card on it to Abuja on a random night bus the day before.

It’s embarrassing that in 2024, the Nigerian Police Force still doesn’t have ways to corroborate evidence, but that’s another story for another time.

Their negligence had worked in my favour.

Again.

The point is that nobody knows who killed the billionaire heir and his "female friend", even as of today, 15 months after the event.

Bayo's family did have many enemies, so it could have been anybody.

Even the private detectives hired by the family came up short, despite being paid millions.

The only unfortunate part is that there was nobody to marvel at the construction and execution of my most brilliant plan yet.

It was the biggest one and I had pulled it off flawlessly.

The spotlight was on me for a very long time, but I was well-prepared for it.

Public opinion was raging-

"The angry girlfriend must have done it."

"He was cheating on her, killing him was her revenge."

"Her father also died when she was young, there must be a pattern."

That was when I broke the news of my pregnancy to the world and showed them the diamond ring Bayo had "proposed" to me with.

"We were going to start a family. He was all I had." I had wailed desperately to Arise news. Or was it Channels?

I can't quite remember, I did a lot of interviews.

Of course, the media bought it.

I think my never-ending tears helped sell the lie too.

The blogs immediately went from labeling me as the "guilty girlfriend" to the "mistreated and grieving fiancée."

Public opinion rapidly swung my way-

"How can he cheat on his pregnant wife after he proposed to her?”

“What kind of man was he!?

“What kind of a family was he from!?"

That was when Bayo's family quickly paid me a few million Naira as "hush money", so I would not talk to any more journalists about their dead son.

Eventually, the buzz around their son’s death quietened and the whole country moved on to more trivial matters.

I honestly wasn't expecting them to give me any sort of compensation after your father died.

I had enough saved from him over the years for us to be comfortable for a very long time.

But I was still grateful for the money.

Part of it was used to buy this house that we currently live in.

And the one in Chicago that we'll be moving to in a few months.

You’re probably wondering why I did all of this.

Wondering what your father did to deserve such a horrible end.

Or maybe you would, when you’re old enough to understand these things I’m saying to you.

But right now, you are only a few months old.

So as I hold you now in my arms, rocking you to sleep, I wonder the type of woman you will become.

Would you be like Mama, constantly complaining about your oppressor without doing anything about it?

Or would you be like Feyi, eventually falling to the same charm that our enemy has used to keep us trapped for years?

Or would you be like me, daring enough to do something about it?

I hope you’ll be like me.

I won't raise you to be a weak woman.

Maybe I'll tell you this story again when you're much older.

Old enough for me to teach you how not to end up like either of them.

Maybe I'll also tell you about the other boyfriends that I had before Bayo.

They were all different guys, but they had met the same fate.

I hope you'll understand that if it wasn't Bayo's infidelity and lies or Papa's violence and short temper, then it would have been another one of them somewhere else, doing something to harm us.

The world we live in is unfair to us.

It has been for generations.

They try to tell us that there's only little we can do to defend ourselves and even much less we can do to stand up for ourselves.

But I have chosen to take a different path.

And so will you, my beautiful daughter.

We will never be their victims, even if it means burning them all to death.

One after the other.

---

Hope you liked this one xx.

READ NEXT -

---

---