SHE RUINED OUR HOME: HOW ONE WOMAN SECRETLY INFECTED MY HUSBAND AND ME WITH HIV

I never imagined that one careless decision one moment of weakness could destroy my home, my marriage, and my health. But life has a way of humbling you in the most painful manner, and sometimes the person you fear is the very one you once trusted.

It started with my husband’s new “friend,” a woman called Fola. She was one of those effortlessly charming types: soft-spoken, always smiling, always pretending to be helpful. She sold fabrics in the same complex where my husband worked, and soon she started visiting our home under the guise of “business.”

I didn’t suspect anything. Why would I? She behaved like a sister laughing with me, helping me cook sometimes, even advising me on marriage issues. Meanwhile, she was sleeping with my husband behind my back.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

One night, after a silly argument about finances, my husband apologized, and we made up. We were intimate that night. It was normal, nothing unusual… until two weeks later when strange symptoms began to show up. First him. Then me.

He became weak. I developed constant fevers. We both had mouth sores that wouldn’t heal. At first, we thought it was stress or malaria, but all the tests kept coming back negative except one.

The day the doctor told us we were both HIV positive, I felt the world sink beneath me. I stared at my husband, waiting for him to deny it, to say something anything. Instead, he broke down like a child and confessed everything.

He had been sleeping with Fola for months.

He didn’t know her status.

He didn’t know she had also targeted me.

Because in one of the most twisted turns of events, she had seduced me too.

It was during a weekend when my husband traveled for work. She came to our house under the excuse of “checking on me,” and in a moment of vulnerability one I wish I could erase from my life something happened between us. I didn’t know she had already been with my husband earlier that same week.

She later told someone that she “wanted to teach us a lesson,” though what lesson and why, nobody ever understood. Rumor had it she was bitter because my husband had refused to give her money she demanded. Others said she simply enjoyed destroying marriages. Whatever her motive, the damage was permanent.

When we confronted her, she didn’t deny anything. She simply said, “What’s done is done,” and walked away like she hadn’t just shattered two lives.

My husband is still trying to rebuild my trust. I’m still trying to rebuild myself. We’re both on medication now, living carefully, learning painfully.

The truth is: HIV is not a death sentence anymore. But betrayal especially intentional betrayal is a wound that no drug can fix.

And every day I ask myself…

If that woman hadn’t entered our lives, would any of this have happened?

Or were we the architects of our own downfall?

Either way, she destroyed our home.

But our healing what’s left of it now depends on us.