Battered Wife

3

After annoying the handsome and kind man at the parking lot, I'd somehow felt way better than I'd ever felt in a long time. So after wiping away all traces of crying and hastily reapplying my makeup, I went back to the third floor of my ten-floor office building, where my office was.

As soon as I returned to my work station, I ignored people's glances at me, closed my eyes and then turned on my computer to finish up the work I'd started in the morning.

Although my company looked like a regular company, I and many of my colleagues knew it was not. We all knew that it was an unknown secret organization for the government. After all, the work of my team members and I involved monitoring CCTV cameras. Mostly, we focused on specific areas to search for suspicious behaviors and criminal activity.

While my job title was software developer, my work was mostly that of a security analyst and a CCTV software developer who was responsible for not only maintaining software used for capturing, storing and analyzing video footage from various unseen cameras around the city, but also occasionally combing through the video footage captured by my assigned cameras.

Once we closed for the day, I rushed out of the company to avoid my colleagues surrounding me to ask me why I had come in late to work because from my conversation with my team leader, Adaku had kept her promise and she hadn't told anyone my crazy serets.

After picking up my only daughter from her school, I headed back home, smiling and humming occasionally as I glanced at her happy face looking down at the new picture book I purchased for her this morning.

Unfortunately, my good mood was ruined as soon as I got home.

After pressing my car horn twice, I just sat in my car waiting for my gateman, Ali, who was hired to open and close our gate, to open the gate.

However, instead of opening the gate wide so I could drive my car into our compound, Ali opened the small side gate for regular people to walk through and rushed to my car window.

Ali was a smart, diligent and honest boy so when I saw him sneaking over to speak to me, I already knew what had happened and in response, my joy sank down to the pit of my belly.

I rolled down my car window before he could complete his hand gestures telling me to roll them down. As soon as I did that, he hastily warned me, "Madam, Oga mama dey house."

Yep, I was right. The only time Ali became sneaky around the house trying to warn me before I entered my own home was when my mother-in-law came visiting.

While my own husband was blind to how badly his mother treated me, despite witnessing it several times, our illiterate gateman was intelligent enough to stare at me with worried eyes.

Even if he'd never really witnessed how badly she treated me, he must have heard her yelling at me several times, which was why every time she came to visit like this without telling anyone, he would run out to inform me so I wouldn't be blindsided.

After a few seconds pause, I nodded and forced a smile that probably looked like a grimace. "Thank you, Ali. Quickly open the gate before she notices anything."

He nodded, "Okay Madam."

Then he ran off to open the gate, watching me with worry-filled eyes as I drove and parked in a different spot in my own home because my husband's obnoxious mother's driver had claimed my parking spot as usual.

After a few minutes pause, I left my stuff in my car including my daughter's new story book and led her into the house with the instruction, "When we enter the house, just go straight to your room after we greet grandma, okay?"