I felt a hand touching my shoulder. It felt rough, as if the hands belonged to a labourer; someone who worked with his hands. I was certain that the hands did not belong to my father-in-law. Who could it be?

“Wanda? Are you asleep?” he whispered in my ear. I froze. I recognized that voice; it belonged to my biological father. But why was he here?

As if he read my mind, my father spoke, “At least I know that Wanda is safe and happier here.” Tears begin to well up in my eyes and I was brought back to my childhood; my biological father had always doted on me. I remember him taking care of me during my formative years; he had always told me that I was destined for greater things so he didn’t allow me to help out in the fields. In a way he protected me from the harshness of growing up. While the other children in the village baked under the hot sun, I was ‘protected’. Although I was exempted from ‘hard labour’, I still had to help out at home, doing housework. My father probably cried his heart out the day I got married. Fighting back my tears, I continued to pretend to be asleep.

“You are contented just to know that she’s ‘safe and happier here’? Then you can leave right now,” my father-in-law challenged him, “You are here because you have always been curious how a tanned, mediocre-looking couple like your wife and you could produce a fair child like Wanda? You wanted to see how this diamond in the rough could be polished under my wife’s tutelage and sparkle?”

In a harsher tone that seemed to echo in the room and stab me in my heart, my father-in-law hissed, “You are a bastard, you always are. You are only here to take advantage of your drunk daughter and fuck her brains out!”