Sweet Seven
Willow Southfield, my wife, hated Luke Xavier, my childhood friend, the most.
Luke hated her too.
Whenever we met up, they would argue.
Luke was half an hour late, and the first thing he said when he came through the door was, “Your makeup makes you look like you came straight out of a horror movie.”
Willow threw his car keys into the ice bucket. “Fish them out and clear your mind.”
My friends said that they were like oil and water, and I was always stuck between them, playing the peacemaker.
Back then, we had been married for years, but we had no children.
I told Willow that I was not in a hurry, but the idea of being childless hurt like a knife in my heart.
Later, the doctors said that her fallopian tubes were blocked, and her chances of getting pregnant were slim to none.
I was worried about her suffering from IVF, so I stopped our families from nagging at her to get pregnant.
Meanwhile, Luke said to me, “Get a grip. You won’t be able to stay together for long if you’re childless. Just divorce her.”
I was so mad that I nearly cut ties with him.
But the next day, Willow approached me with an IVF form.
With teary eyes, she said, “I’d like to try and have a child of our own.”
On the day we learned that she was pregnant, I hugged her and cried.
I thought that things would change for us.
Then, three months later, Luke accidentally sent me a voice message while drunk.
The voice was Willow’s. She sounded amused. “He touched my stomach today, and he looked so stupid.”
“Did my baby kick him?” Luke asked in a whisper.
When I finished listening to the voice message, I did not ask any questions.
I just deleted the names that I had come up with for the baby.