‘How Stella, my childhood friend, ruined my marriage’ (3)

This is the concluding part of Amanda, Gilbert and Stella’s story started penultimate Sunday.When Amanda and Gilbert got married, for five years there was no child. Though she was conceiving, but she was having series of miscarriage so much that it started giving Gilbert some concerns. While Amanda was in the heat of her problem was when fate brought Stella her way. Stella her childhood friend who avoided her for years just because her WASC result was extremely poor.

That Saturday afternoon, Gilbert left a written note for his wife  Amanda that he was going to a salon for a haircut. He didn’t want to disturb her because she had cried for hours and needed rest. She in fact cried herself to sleep because Gilbert’s mother had called on the phone asking her what had been preventing her from giving her son a child. Hence, she got so worried that she cried heavily. When she eventually woke up, she read the note her husband had dropped for her and smiled. “The line that made me smile was where he wrote that he still loved me despite our pregnancy issues.”

She sprang up from bed, scurried into her bath tub and hurried her bath just to meet Gilbert at the salon. While she was driving to the salon, she had to pull over at a grocery shop to buy some fruits and vegetables especially cucumbers which her doctor said she should be eating. That those greenish rolls have good tendency of inducing ovulation. So, she alighted and packed heaps of cucumbers as if her whole life depended on them. While she was busy selecting fresh ones, a lady who was also buying groceries called her gently. That voice sounded so familiar that she had to look up to see the person. Behold the lady who called her  was her one time good friend, who avoided her because she had a poor result and had to re-write her WASC exam. “We hugged each other, we chatted and laughed. In fact, we had a lot to discuss and never knew where to start from. All she told me at once was that she just graduated from Nsukka, same university I finished from and that she was in Lagos for her youth service. I nodded in pity, knowing that she ought to have finished some five or six years back when I finished. But because she was not brilliant enough, she had some delays. She also told me how accommodation had been a big issue for her and that she was tired of squatting from one place to the other. While she was telling me her stories, we walked to  where I parked my car and she hopped in. She was amazed that I was driving such a big car. She saw my wedding band on my marriage finger and said she was happy for me,” she enthused.

Amanda drove Stella home and changed her mind from going to see her husband at the salon. They came home and the first thing Amanda did was to give her friend her wedding album. When Amanda saw Gilbert’s pictures smiling with his wife Amanda, she looked at the pictures very closely and nodded. Her mind wandered off to where and when she met him. She remembered that Gilbert was her friend’s brother whom she met so many years ago in a party. Then he was still in the university. University of Port Harcourt to be precise. “I met him in a party and his kid sister Eunice introduced him to me. We got talking, danced together, drank together and became close friends. When the party was over, I didn’t go back to school. Eunice and I came home because of her brother’s party so we stayed and spent some days before we went back to school. She had told me about him and assured me that her brother would like me because I was dark skinned and beautiful. Those were her words. And just as she said, the guy was all over me. We dated for a while, he was coming to visit me in school where I was having pre degree studies. I couldn’t gain admission into university at the right time because my JAMB scores were poor. So, when I started having some issues with Eunice his sister, he boasted that she would see to it that her brother stopped seeing me. And honestly she did. Gilbert stopped coming and that was how we parted ways. I never knew what she told her brother and that was how the affair stopped,” Stella said.

All these thoughts were running riot in Stella’s brain even as she went through Amanda’s album. “But I never told her I had something to do with her husband. That would sound stupid of me. But I felt bad what Eunice did to me because I knew then that Gilbert loved me. But Eunice who was good in painting one black, must have told her brother something bad about me that made him stopped coming to me. Even when I visited, he was cold to me and asked me to leave that he had an important place to go and that he would come to see me but he never did. I regretted not being his wife, I told myself times without number that I would have been his wife if not for Eunice the spoiler,” she soliloquized.

Amanda was in the kitchen trying to fix lunch when Gilbert opened the door to the living room and walked in. When Stella saw him, he called him by his name and Gilbert knew the voice. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see my good friend Amanda. We met at the grocery shop this afternoon. She is in the kitchen. Oh Gilbert it’s been ages. Remember the old times, how you promised..”

“I hope you have not told Amanda what happened between us?” He cut in.

“Oh never! That should be a top secret. She would never know. Meanwhile how is Eunice your sister?”

“She is in London with her family.”

“Oh that’s nice. She boasted that she was going to make her brother stopped seeing me and she did. Powerful girl.”

“You were dating your principal and vice principal at the same time. So much that the two guys had a fight over you, right? That was nonsensical. Stella I never knew you could be that cheap, sleeping around instead of..

“But that never happened,” she cut in. “ Eunice pleaded with me to help her copy some notes which I couldn’t because I had no time for that, I needed to read. She got angry and boasted that she would ensure her brother stopped seeing me. That ever since her brother started dating me was when I started behaving like a peacock, and that she would break my wings.”

When Stella and Gilbert heard Amanda’s voice from the kitchen, the duo stopped talking. “Darling, that’s my childhood friend Stella,” Amanda told her husband. “She would be staying with us pending when she would get an accommodation. She is serving here in Lekki Phase (1). Just a stone throw to our house. We attended same primary and secondary schools before we parted ways. She is more like a sister to me and I pray you don’t say no please,” she pleaded.

Gilbert obliged and Stella moved into Amanda and Gilbert’s guest room. That was the beginning of Amanda’s problems. Her good gestures of harboring a dear friend  became a sour taste in her tongue and worsened her case. Gilbert and Stella continued from where they stopped  when she convinced him that his sister merely blackmailed her. They were having their affair secretly until it resulted in pregnancy. Stella was bent on giving Gilbert what his wife couldn’t give him for five years. Now, Gilbert’s mother is insisting that her son marries Stella as his second wife and Amanda’s world got shattered  when she heard what happened!

Readers what advice do you have for Amanda?