I Ended My Pregnancy in College—Years Later, Two Little Girls Appeared at My Window Every Night Crying, “Mom, Why Didn’t You Let Us Live?”

Chapter 2

That question stayed with me like a splinter buried too deep to pull out.

For weeks I told myself it had been a nightmare—nothing more than my guilty conscience drafting its own ghost story. I threw myself back into my routines. I kept buying pregnancy tests in secret, folding them into tissue and dropping them to the bottom of the bin. And every month, the same empty result stared back at me, mocking the hope I kept trying to resurrect.

David and I went from hospital to hospital. We sat in waiting rooms that smelled of antiseptic and old magazines, our hands folded in our laps, our names called by tired nurses. The doctors scanned my womb, ran blood tests, checked everything that could be checked. And every single time, they gave us the same smiling verdict:

“Mr. and Mrs. David, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the two of you. You are both one hundred percent medically fit. Just relax. Have regular intimacy. The babies will come.”

David took their words the way a starving man takes bread. “You heard them, honey. We’re fine. We just keep praying. God’s time is the best.” He kissed my forehead and went to sleep with a light heart.

I stayed awake with a heavy one. Because how could I relax? How could any woman with a bleeding past relax? David’s God and the doctors’ machines could examine my body all they wanted—neither of them could see the two small ghosts standing in my memory every time I closed my eyes.

The days blurred into each other. I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and press my hands to my flat stomach, and I would whisper apologies to a pair of children who had never drawn breath. The doctors said my body was ready to carry life. But my womb felt like a locked room, and every time I tried the handle, I heard a small, patient knock from the other side.

Then came the night I could no longer call it a nightmare.

It must have been around three in the morning. The ceiling fan hummed its usual tired song. David’s breath rose and fell in slow, steady waves beside me. And then the air in the room changed—thickened, turned cold, pressed down on everything like a held breath waiting to be released.

My eyes opened on their own, the way eyes open when the body knows it is not alone.

They were there. Floating. Right there, in front of our marriage bed.

Two girls. Identical. Small. Their skin glowed faintly, like moonlight trapped beneath water. They wore neat white gowns that did not stir, even though the fan spun above their heads. Tears streamed down their tiny faces, and their eyes were dark and endless.

“Mommy,” the first one said. Her voice was thin and hollow, as if it had traveled a very long distance to reach me. “Why did you slice us away? Why did you deny us life?”

The second stretched out her small hands toward me. “We wanted to play, Mommy. We wanted to go to school. We wanted to live. Why did you take all of that from us?”

I could not move. My heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my throat. I wanted to scream, but the sound died somewhere between my chest and my lips. David lay inches from me, snoring softly, deaf to everything.

And then the past came back like a flood breaking through a dam I had spent years reinforcing.

The cold clinic table. The too-bright light. The sharp sting that made my body clench. The antiseptic smell that clung to my skin for days. And after it was over—how I had laughed about it with Cynthia and Anita over fried rice and soft drinks, like we had simply cancelled a subscription we no longer needed. I had laughed. I had actually laughed, and I had buried the whole thing under a promise to never think about it again.

But judgment, I was beginning to understand, does not announce its arrival. It simply shows up at your door one night, wearing the faces you tried to forget.

For three nights in a row, they came. Same gowns. Same tears. Same question, recited like a verse I would never be able to unhear. I woke each time screaming, soaked in sweat, and each morning I invented a fresh lie for David’s worried face.

“Just a bad dream, honey. Go back to sleep.”

On the third night, David did not reach for the lamp quietly. He switched it on, grabbed my shoulders, and turned me to face him. His eyes were bloodshot and furious.

“Elizabeth! This is the third time this week! You’re shaking. You’re sweating. You keep shouting ‘forgive me’ in your sleep! What is the meaning of this? What are you hiding from me?!”

The load was too heavy to carry for one more second. I slid off the bed and landed on my knees on the cold floor, sobbing.

“David, please don’t kill me. Please don’t leave me. When I was in the university, I lived a bad life. I got pregnant with twins—and I removed it. The two girls I keep seeing every night are the twins I aborted.”

David’s face went blank. The room seemed to freeze around us. He stared at me the way you stare at a stranger who somehow knows the code to your house.

“You… did what?” His voice cracked. “You aborted twins? And you told me you were a virgin until marriage?”

“I’m sorry, David. I was young. I was foolish. I made a terrible mistake.”

He did not shout. He did not hit me. He simply pulled his legs away from my grasping hands, climbed back onto the bed, turned his back to me, and switched off the light.

For two days, he did not speak a single word to me. He would not eat my food. He would not look at my face. The silence in that house was louder than any argument we could ever have had, and I moved through it like a ghost, apologizing to walls.

I cooked his favorite meals—pepper soup, jollof rice, the fried plantain he loved—and set them on the table, and he ate without lifting his eyes from his plate, as if I had become a waiter he no longer recognized. At night, I lay on my side of the bed, as far from him as the mattress would allow, and I listened to the cold distance between us grow. I had wanted a child so badly. And I had traded my husband’s trust to chase one. The arithmetic of my life was beginning to look like a debt I could never repay.

That night, they came again. And this time, I did not run. I fell on my knees in front of them, weeping and blowing my nose and wringing my hands.

“My babies, please. I am begging you in the name of God. I know I sinned against you. But please forgive me. What are we going to do to give birth? I’m sorry about what happened. Please lift this agony from my head.”

They did not smile. Their little faces stayed hard and sorrowful, like two small judges.

“You will not give birth till six years,” they chanted together, their voices locking into a terrible, chilling harmony that shook the very floor of my heart. “You will not. You will not.”

Then they dissolved into the air like smoke from a blown-out candle.

I sat on the floor, shivering, until the gray light of dawn crept through the curtains.

The next morning, David stood by the door with his leather bag, his face harder than I had ever seen it. He did not look at me.

“Prepare. My mother is taking you to where you can give birth.”

“David, please—are you still angry with me? Can we talk about—”

“Elizabeth, I don’t have time for long talk. My mother is already waiting. Just do what I said.”

My legs were shaking as I walked to the wardrobe to dress. And then the air turned cold again.

I did not need to turn around. I knew they were there.

“Mommy.” Their voices were knives wrapped in silk. “Where are you going? Do you think you can run away from us? You want to go and look for a baby, don’t you? We warn you—do not try to outsmart us. You cannot force a child into that womb.”

My knees gave way. I clutched my head and screamed until David burst through the door.

He found me on the floor, hands over my ears, shaking. I told him, choking on the words, what I had seen. He hissed through his teeth.

“Are you the only person in this world who has ever done an abortion?! What is it? What do they want? I am tired of all this spiritual nonsense every single day. Stand up. Let’s go. My mother is waiting.”

I dried my face. I changed my clothes. And I followed him out of the house.

But my heart was pounding, and somewhere in the back of my skull, a cold, patient voice kept repeating the same question:

*I am about to walk into the one place they told me not to go. If I disobey them, what will I be carrying when I come back out?*