NIGERIAN SWEETHEARTS; An Arranged Marriage

CHAPTER 22 The Till closes

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As they held me captive and the only person I saw was a military doctor who came to change my wound dressing, I wondered what the plans the President and his son had for me were.

Ali Bashir had asked me why I had planned his fiance's kidnapping. I didn't have any special reasons. Except of course, money. More money. I got 700 million from this.
Of course that money was never going to get back to them. I had people in the bank that would make sure of that. Managers. They knew I had a hand in less than clean dealings. And in the event of this, most of the money I had would be untouchable. Money I got from 'special methods' was never in my account anyways. I kept just my salary there.

I was careless, that I admit.
I should have ordered the girl to be killed once she saw me. I liked her but was a necessary step I should have taken.
I had a few contacts that I could trust, I could be extradited from this dungeon in no time and go into hiding for the time being. Nobody knew this land as I did, plus I had the funding. I would lay low and then after Bashir's tenure, things would be easier for me. I was a powerful man and I still am.
I never had anything against the girl. She was just a means to more power. I had learnt from my mistakes.

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I stilled my breathing as I heard footsteps enter the room.

"Ma'am, can you hear me?"

I was pretending to still be asleep. I knew they wanted to give me bad news.
"Ms Abubakar?"

"Yes?", I looked at the nurse standing in front of me.

"You're stable but we wanted to let you know the baby didn't make it."

I shut my eyes again, this time not pretending.

I think I would have liked to be a mother. Even if it was for an hour. After the nurse told me I had lost the baby, I felt cheated. If I got pregnant, it was unfair that I didn't know. I should have at least rubbed my belly, imagined a little child growing in me, dream of a possible future.
I felt they didn't try enough. That was terrible thought considering I was a doctor myself. I knew how first trimester pregnancies were out of anybody's hand. And considering I was drugged. That must have been very bad for the baby
I felt sad. I felt like a failure for not feeling anything. How could I not know I had a child in me for months. How did my body not inform me? How did I only find out when my baby died. And yet I didn't have the courtesy of feeling different after the loss.
What sort of a mother was I to that child?

So far everybody was tiptoeing about the pregnancy topic. Ali would just sit quietly with me. I was very disoriented and couldn't tell the story of what happened to me while I was abducted or how they even got a hold of me.

What I found out, was that nobody really knew how I had been taken.
My house was locked and everything was in place when they first started looking for me. I had gone to work, it seemed, as those from my office said they saw me leave early that day.
And then Ali had come to see me that evening but I wasn't answering my calls or the door so he started getting worried and called my father the next day.
Jamal and Ali had actually put aside their differences and come together to help out. Jamal wanted to see me but I kept ignoring his calls. Actually I was ignoring everyone's calls. I had a short list of those allowed to visit me in the President's villa. My father, Hauwa, the President and Zahra. Ali was almost a permanent fixture. We hadn't talked much about anything but there wasn't anything of significance to say really. We were with each other and that was all that mattered. Everything I had worried about previously seemed so unimportant in the light of recent findings. Being 3 months apart and not knowing if someone was dead probably would do that to you. It was clear we had anchored ourselves with ourselves.
I was happy. No,6 happy wasn't the word. I felt centred.