Scarsdale, New York: Sunday 21st October 2018

Of the four of us, I must have been the last one to see that there was already someone waiting for us in the private room. I was bringing up the rear, Francis up front pushing Grace in the wheelchair and Sue sandwiched in the middle.

“James, what are you doing here?” Francis’ deep voice boomed out, the tone of his voice matching the surprised look on his face.

“Honestly, I’m not too sure. Grace texted me and asked me to come over to meet you all. I’m a bit confused myself, and the University’s going to be really mad at me because I had to shut down an expensive experiment half-way through.”

All eyes turned to Grace, who was now looking decidedly uncomfortable and unhappy to be the center of attention. For what seemed an age all of us were looking at Grace, waiting for her to say something to explain. She seemed incapable of speaking, just looking down at the floor, taking in the site of her feet resting on the wheelchair’s two rubberized footrests.

Inevitably, it was Sue who helped Grace over the line, crouching by her side and putting a friendly arm around her shoulder.

“Come on, Grace, sweetheart. The four of us have been through a lot these last weeks. You know that better than anyone. I can’t imagine anything you’re afraid to tell us can shock any of us after the last few weeks.”

“I’m not so sure,” came Grace’s immediate response, as she turned to grasp Sue’s hand for support, as she looked pleadingly into her friend’s green eyes.

Sue, ever the mother, smiled reassuringly at her young friend. “Whatever it is, better out than in. I think these last few weeks have shown you we’re all here for each other. Honey, just take a deep breath and get it all out in one go. Then it’s done.”

Grace continued to hang onto Sue’s hand for emotional support, still looking deeply into her eyes as she tried to make up her mind and find the courage to speak.

And then something changed. Her fear and hesitation switched into a determined and angry look. She released Sue’s hand, using her freed hand to point at Francis.

Speaking to none of us and all of us, she declared, “That man over there, is a total and complete bastard. Your mother, Doctor Winnie, who did so much good for people, would be ashamed of you, Francis.”

Francis made to speak, but Grace was nowhere near done and didn’t even give him a chance to get started.

“He’s a total and utter bastard who’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. Never mind who gets hurt or destroyed in the process.”

Grace looked around at three of the four other faces in the room and saw our confusion. Lowering her shaking hand which had still been pointing at Francis, she placed it on her tummy.

“For the last few months, that man has been blackmailing me and threatening me and my family back home. He told me if I didn’t do what he said he knew people who would make sure that bad, terrible things happened to my family. He even had his friends pay my mother and sister a visit so I’d understand he meant business. And as if that wasn’t enough, he forced me to get myself pregnant.”

As she said these last words, she looked across at James, and I think the mists started to rise just a tiny bit for a number of us.

“I’m so sorry James, and I’m so sorry you had to find out like this. But I couldn’t keep it inside me any longer. Not after I just found out that bastard’s gone and got Sue pregnant as well.”

All eyes now turned to James. James who’d just found out he was going to be a daddy and found out in the strangest of ways.

Understandably, James wasn’t in a condition to explain much or speak, so Grace continued the story. “Francis told me I had to get pregnant, so he and a doctor friend of his could pass the child off as Pete’s so that Francis could drive a wedge between Sue and Pete.”

Again, turning to look at James, Grace’s voice dropped so we had to struggle to hear her. “I’m so sorry, James. So sorry I seduced you and that you had to find out like this. So sorry I made you promise to keep quiet about it and didn’t take any of your calls. I hope it’s some small comfort to you, but when Francis forced me into this, I couldn’t think of a sweeter or smarter guy that I’d rather have as a father to my child.”

James, who had always been an enigma to us, stood up. I assumed he was going across to Grace, but instead, he diverted halfway across to stand directly in front of Francis, with anger and indignation in every muscle of his face.

He was a good four or five inches taller than Francis, but far lighter and less muscular. But that didn’t stop him. Without a moment’s hesitation, his knee came up with frightening speed and slammed directly into Francis’ man parts.

Even if you are a lightweight, I guess a working knowledge of mechanics and some long thin levers allow you to deliver quite a force into the softest and most tender parts of the male anatomy.

Francis collapsed to the floor, yelping in pain and clutching his wounded pride. He was totally unable to speak, only a wheezy breathy sound coming from between his lips. He was on his knees, both hands in his wounded groin, which of course placed his head at a tempting height.

James’s knee moved a second time with surprising force and accuracy, connecting with a loud crunch into what had been Francis’ nose.

This time Francis’ scream must have been heard across half the hospital, and his hands moved from his groin to his face to protect it from further damage, and also to slightly reduce the blood flow from his splattered septum.

“That’s for Grace, you fucking bastard,” James shouted, showing a side of him we’d never seen before. For a moment I thought he was going to wind up for the kill, but he seemed happy with his work as his enemy stayed submissively on his knees.

The door suddenly burst open, the frame filled by two burly hospital security guards. They took one look at the prone doctor and moved into the room, moving menacingly towards James who now had blood on his trousers.

Francis somehow had the presence of mind and energy to raise a single outstretched hand up, and the guys stopped, looking at each other in confusion.

Sue intervened, talking to the guards who obviously recognized her. “Doctor Etebo did something that he’d rather keep private. And this young gentleman administered some old testament justice. You know, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose. A pair of balls for a transgression the Doctor and I’m sure the hospital would rather keep quiet.”

Doctor Etebo nodded his hand mournfully, his stop gesture turning into a ‘shoo’, go away gesture which the bemused guards had the good sense to follow.

Grace surprised me by getting out of the wheelchair and helping her enemy to his feet, and then over to the wheelchair. I marveled at her generosity of spirit, something I knew I’d not match in her circumstances.

But as he slumped into the chair, I realized I’d misjudged Grace again. Because as she’d helped him up and then down into the chair, her hand had been in the perfect position to reach into Francis’ blazer pocket and extract his cell phone.

Before he knew what was happening, Grace had asked for and got his PIN from Sue, and seemed to be scrolling through Francis’ contacts. A look of satisfaction on her face told me she’d found the number she’d been after. Moments later the phone was on speaker and everyone in the room was listening to the dial tone as we waited for the other party to pick up.

It took five rings because I remember counting them as I held my breath.

“Hi Francis, what can I do for you on this lovely Sunday morning?”

I wasn’t totally sure, but it sounded like Doctor Okafor. I’d only met him the one time, but it sounded like him and it would make perfect sense if this is who Grace had chosen to call.

“Doctor Okafor, this isn’t Francis, this is his friend Nurse Grace Kayuni. You know, the girl from Malawi who you did the paternity test on for Francis.”

“Yes Grace, what can I do for you? Is Francis okay? Is there something wrong with him, is that why you’re calling on his phone?” his deep African voice asked, sounding slightly unnerved by this unexpected caller on Francis’ phone.

“Well, now that you ask, Francis isn’t so good. Not good at all. He’s had his nose and his balls smashed in by a rather unpleasant six-foot-seven friend of mine, for lying to everyone and pretending Pete was the father of my baby.”

There was a deathly silence on the other end of the phone. I’d have given anything to be a fly on the wall and see the look on Doctor Okafor’s face.

“And you know, I could ask my friend to come right over to your home this peaceful Sunday morning and dish out the same rough justice to you, maybe while your wife and kids look on. But that would be the least of your worries, because you’ve got precisely five seconds to tell me the truth about that paternity test, and if you carry on lying my next stop is the hospital administrator’s office accompanied by my lawyer, with three different paternity tests showing that no way is Mr. Peter Jones the biological father of my baby.”

Still the deathly silence. I could imagine him squirming and trying desperately to find a way out of his hellish dilemma.

“I’m going to start counting now Doctor Okafor and remember my offer of not taking this to the hospital authorities if you tell the truth is a one-time offer. Five, four, three ….”

“All right, all right. Yes, it’s like you said. Francis knows about an affair I’ve been having behind my wife’s back, and he blackmailed me into falsifying the results. He gave me Mr. Jones’ DNA and then I made up the results. Of course, there was no match. But I can’t tell you who the father is. I’d need a sample of his DNA for that.”

“That’s okay, I know who the real father is. There’s only one other man it could be,” she said, casting a tender glance across at James.

In this maelstrom of emotions, I actually felt a sense of loss and humiliation. I’d spent the last two and a half months thinking I was going to be a father again. And sure, it had turned my world upside down and done huge damage to my marriage. But in many ways, it had felt good. The feeling of vitality and virility at having sired a second child, especially as I thought this was beyond me. All the thoughts of re-living again all the happy times I’d had with Sue as we’d raised Donovan and watched him grow from a baby to a child to a young man.

And now all of this had been ripped away in the space of a ten-minute flurry of revelations and violence. And it hurt, leaving me feeling relieved that maybe I could save my marriage, but also empty at what had just been ripped away and handed to James.

It was his baby, his DNA, growing inside Grace. By the sound of it he’d only slept with Grace once or twice, but in this short time, his seed had succeeded where mine had failed over a whole year. And, of course, this left me feeling a bit flat.

“Thank you, Doctor Okafor. I’d like you to courier a handwritten letter confirming what you’ve just told me to an address that I’m about to text you. And, unlike you, I can be trusted and I’ll only use this letter if you cause any trouble for me at the hospital. And just remember, Doctor, I have three tests here that prove you’re a liar and deserve to be fired and put in prison. So, I strongly recommend you write that letter, as the alternative is a lot worse.”

Grace then calmly clicked ‘call end’ and turned to look at Francis.

“And as for you, after you’ve got your nose and balls fixed, I’m giving you one week to resign and get the hell out of this hospital. I suggest you go back to Nigeria and try and atone for your shitty tricks by doing the types of good works that made people love your sainted mother so much. And if you choose to be your normal stubborn self and make a fight of it, just remember how a pack of African hyenas are as nothing compared to a bunch of New York lawyers with the scent of a malpractice suit in their nostrils.” I was glad that this young woman was on my side, and wondered if she’d been taking lessons from Jenny in the how to ‘make a man’s balls shrivel’ class.

“Now, as the daddy of my child, James said, why don’t you just fuck off and go and start packing your sorry ass ready for the airport.” I smiled to myself, Grace had picked up a truly impressive feel for the American vernacular in her short time in the country. With vocabulary like that, if she grew bored with nursing, she could always have a future on one of those really trashy daytime TV shows that peddled manufactured catfights.

Francis tried to stare down Grace and make a final stand, but he was a beaten man. If he’d been a dog (which arguably he was), he’d have slunk off with his eyes downcast and his tail between his legs. Any beliefs that he was the top dog and had any say in events totally eviscerated by James’ physical assault and then Grace’s coup-de-grace.

As he slunk out of the room, the whole tone and feeling in the room changed.

The four of us just looked at each other. All with very different thoughts and actions. To describe the heroine of the hour first, Grace was shaking with the after-effects of combat and a body shot through with pure adrenaline. The moment Francis left the room and her enemy was vanquished, she collapsed shaking into the wheelchair. A spent force, having used her all to destroy her much larger and more senior enemy. James had a strange look on his face, and I could see that he wanted to go across and comfort Grace, but was a bit unsure what to do. Not least because until today he’d only been a one-night stand to Grace, who in his eyes was still my woman.

Sue looked utterly bewildered by the turn of events. Around an hour ago she’d been happily planning her pregnancy and child-rearing with her handsome Nigerian lover. And now he was most likely going to be five thousand miles away, banished to a different continent and playing no part in the upbringing of the child Sue and he had made.

And me, what was I feeling? Well, like I described earlier, I was feeling loss that I wasn’t going to be a daddy with Grace. And a little emasculated that Grace’s one-night stand had got her pregnant where over twelve months I’d drawn a blank.

But the flip-side was that I had the growing hope that after what I knew would be a turbulent few days, I had the growing hope that maybe Sue and I could rebuild our marriage which looked like it had been destined for the rocks.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My prediction that the next few days would be turbulent, not a hard forecast to make, proved one hundred percent accurate.

Grace drove home with James, and we didn’t see hide nor hair of the two of them for the next couple of days. And I drove Sue home. I don’t think either of us was really in a great condition to drive, but I was probably marginally the safer driver, in terms of mental space.

When we got home, Sue immediately went straight upstairs and locked the door to our bedroom. Almost immediately I heard the sounds of sobbing. From past experience, I knew that it was best to leave Sue be for around an hour or so. Until she’d got the worst of it out of her system and wanted to talk.

It was about ninety minutes after the sobbing had started that my fifth round of gentle knocking and soft-voiced requests to be allowed in finally bore fruit. She unlocked the door, and retreated to the bed, lying with her face away from me. I snuggled up behind her and wrapped my arms around her, kissing her softly and started to stroke her hair in a way her mother had always done to comfort her when she was a little girl.

It was maybe another thirty minutes before she was ready to talk. But then it all came out.

How could I ever love her and trust her again? How could I want her and stay with her knowing that she was carrying another man’s child? A man like Francis who had done such terrible things in the last few months. Who’d lied and cheated, and tricked not just one but two women into getting pregnant?

I spoke from the heart when I told Sue that this wasn’t on her. It was on both of us. And I gave her my honest assessment, which was maybe a little more balanced and open-minded than Francis deserved.

I told Sue that in my opinion, Francis was a fundamentally good guy. That’s why we’d both accepted him as a friend, and that’s why she’d fallen in love with him. But that I think like he’d told us right at the beginning, he wasn’t ‘a sharer’, and that his love and need for Sue had overwhelmed him and pushed him into a kind of madness.

I reminded Sue of what Francis’ own mother had said, that ever since he was a young boy, this stubborn need to have what he wanted was hard-wired into his behavior. I told her I wasn’t condoning or supporting what Francis did. Rather I was trying to understand it so that we wouldn’t beat ourselves up too much.

I kept hammering home at the message that we were both together in this. If one of us had been stupid and short-sighted, then both of us had been guilty of these things together.

Sue slowly accepted the truth in what I was saying. About us having made mistakes together. And she also understood and agreed with what I said about Francis. That in the end he’d just become overwhelmed by what had become an obsession about having Sue.

When she was more comfortable about these things, Sue came back to the subject of how I could bear to see her pregnant with Francis’ baby. For both of us, abortion which was still a legal possibility was not a moral alternative we were comfortable with. Maybe okay for others, but not for us.

But whenever Sue raised this, I reminded her of what I’d been prepared to do to just keep her in my life for half the week. Now I had her fully back, and to me helping her raise another little human being wasn’t a price to be paid. It was a wonderful opportunity. Sue could see the truth and love in my eyes when I told her I didn’t care who the father was. The child was half her biologically, and emotionally he or she would be one hundred percent our child,

As Sue and I talked things through, bit-by-bit she began to be optimistic about the future. Of course, she would have preferred that the baby she was carrying was mine, not Francis’ child. But at least she had the whole motherhood thing to look forward to again, and I loved seeing the new light in her eyes.

Of course, a big part of Sue was still grieving for her love for Francis. That love had started dying that morning in the private room in the hospital as the truth about the pregnancies had emerged. But still, you don’t stop loving someone just like that. It’s not a switch you just flick on or off.

Which brought us to one of the final acts of this part of our marriage.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was Saturday 27th October and Francis was flying out early the following day. He’d quit the hospital, rather than chance his arm fighting a battle he couldn’t win with Grace. As far as we knew he was heading back to Nigeria. We’d had no direct contact with him after the Sunday morning when James had bust his balls and then his face.

But Jenny had been in touch, and according to her he was selling up and moving back to Nigeria. At least on the surface, he was distraught about losing Sue, the way he’d behaved and about the prospect of having a child he’d never see grow up.

It was around five p.m. when Sue and I had ‘the talk’.

I knew something had been on her mind all day. She’d been antsy and unable to settle. With a distant look in her face, seemingly in a faraway place.

Sue finally came out with it just as the afternoon started passing into the evening. Her face told me she was nervous to say what she was about to say.

“Pete, honey. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I want to see Francis one last time. To get closure before he flies off to Nigeria. I’ll understand if you say no, and that will be an end of it. But please remember, he’s going to be the biological father of the child you and will be raising for the next eighteen years. I don’t want to leave things with him the way they were at the hospital. He’s been a total and utter fool and behaved appallingly. But one day we’re going to have to talk to our little girl or boy about her father. What do you think?”

The truth is, the moment I’d seen that look in Sue’s face earlier in the day, I was pretty sure that Sue’s strange mood was linked to Francis’ impending departure. And this feeling grew in me during the day. But still, I didn’t see this request coming.

I looked into those beautiful green eyes. I saw such love and commitment in her face. I told Sue I’d need to think about it, and took myself off around the block for a walk.

I walked for maybe an hour. I tossed it around and looked at it from all the angles I could think of. Of course, I wasn’t a total idiot. The last three years had taught me that anything to do with my and Sue’s addiction wasn’t risk-free. But I felt overwhelmingly confident that if I said yes to Sue, that Francis and Sue wouldn’t between them work some kind of voodoo magic that would result in Sue flying off to Nigeria on Sunday morning.

And the other big thing was trust. I was as certain as I could be that Sue would return home on Sunday morning. But there was a hard and clinical voice in my head that said that if she didn’t, then hard as it would be, I was better off without her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As I watched Sue’s tail lights disappear around the corner on that Saturday night, I felt a little like those nuclear scientists in the Manhattan Experiment. I’d looked at all the facts, I’d looked into Sue’s eyes and I was as sure as I could be that I knew how things would turn out. I was like guys who’d done all the equations and pulled it up and down, left and right. Before giving the green light to Enola Gay.

But, like them, until I saw the actual proof, I couldn’t be a hundred percent certain that I hadn’t made a huge mistake. In their world and in my world, ninety-nine point nine didn’t count.

It was going to be a long night, just as it had been for them back in 1945.

(Thanks again to cbears52 and the moderators for all their help.)