“The best person for me is my wife, and love is not just a matter of fate. It is also a matter of destiny.”
“But won’t it be dull? Men think marriage is like a tomb and can’t find the freshness in love anyhow.”
“I don’t know what other people think, but at least, I don’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s simple. When the so-called first love ends, love dies and there is no reincarnation. The next love is just a shadow of love. What is precious is not the first love, but love. When the shadow of love understands love, marriage will no longer be the grave.”
This simple truth of love by Kevin deeply warmed Bella’s fragile heart. In fact, she never had much confidence in marriage because she saw far more unfortunate marriages than happy ones.
In the evening of the next day, she called Kevin, “Hey, are you off work yet?”
“Soon, what’s up?”
“Go home. Do you forget?”
“Oh, I don’t forget.”
Kevin replied, a little down, “Don’t worry. Since I promised you, I won’t go back on my word.”
“Then I’ll wait for you at school. You come to pick me up and we’ll go home together.”
“Okay.”
After hanging up the phone, Bella came to the school entrance and waited patiently for Kevin. Louis was the last one to leave the school every day. He honked the car horn. Bella was attracted and slowly walked over and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Who are you waiting for?”
“I’m waiting for my husband.”
Louis felt lost, “Do you want a ride?”
“No, he’ll be here soon.”
“Well, see you then.”
“Hey wait-”
Bella called out to him, “If it’s convenient, please go see Alice. Her family is abroad. I can’t go to the hospital to see her today because of something important.”
“I’m just going to see her.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Louis gave her with a meaningful glance, stepped on the clutch, and sailed away.
Soon after he left, Kevin drove to the school. After Bella got in, she clapped her hands and said, “Let’s go.”
“Can I discuss something with you?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t force me to do something I don’t want to do when I get back.”
“Such as?”
“If I don’t want to eat, you don’t force me to eat. If I don’t want to stay in the living room, you don’t purposely drag me into it.”
“Oh okay, no problem.”
They reached a consensus. The car quickly drove to the Cloud Mansion. As soon as the young master came back, the guard immediately ran in to report to Blanche. Blanche heard her son back, and she was excited. In the past month, she had been living like a year missing her son so much.
Kevin gloomily entered the home with Bella. The family had been ready to welcome him. When they met him, the feelings of missing was self-evident, and Blanche was the first to tremble to speak, “Are you back?”
“Yes.”
Kevin nodded with an expressionless face. But he still couldn’t get over the things his parents had done.
“I didn’t know you guys were back, so I didn’t prepare any dishes. But the kitchen is preparing it now, so you can rest for a while and eat right away.”
“You don’t need to prepare anything. I don’t have much of an appetite.”
Kevin said and went upstairs. A few people looked at each other. Blanche screwed her husband hard, so Patrick said in a cold voice, “Come with me to the study for a moment. I want to talk to you.”
Blanche made another wink at Bella, so Bella immediately ran to Kevin, “Go ahead, Dad wants to talk to you.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Don’t be like that. Dad has said that, and you should respect him.”
Kevin glared at her. Did he discuss everything with her for nothing just now on the way?
Reluctantly, along with his father, he entered the study. When the door closed, Blanche excitedly pulled Bella to sit on the sofa, “Bella, I really don’t know how to thank you. You are simply my sweetheart.”
Bella smiled apologetically, “You are too kind. This is what I promised you in the first place, and now I am only fulfilling my promise.”
“What reason do you have to make such a promise to us? All in all, it’s our Jones-Sharp family’s fortune to have a daughter-in-law as good as you.”
“Come on mom, don’t praise me. I’ll be haughty because of your love and indulgence.”
Blanche patted her shoulder, and was very grateful to her.
“By the way, your last medical checkup was okay, right?”
“Oops.” When she mentioned this, Bella remembered that she still had two more medical forms at the hospital that she hadn’t picked up.
“What’s wrong?”
“I forgot to get it.”
“Look at you, you’re not usually a scatterbrain. Why did you forget to get the medical checklist.”
Bella rubbed her forehead, “There’s been too much going on lately, and I feel a bit dizzy.”
“Never mind. You take the time to get it tomorrow. If you don’t have time, I can get it for you.”
“No, I don’t have class tomorrow afternoon, so I can go by myself.”
“Okay.”
The door to the study had been closed for an hour, but there was no sign of him coming out yet. Bella couldn’t help but feel a little worried, “Mom, what is Dad talking to Kevin. Why does it take so long?”
“I don’t know. It’s all about the men anyway.”
“Hopefully, the stalemate between him and you will ease up when they come out later.”
“I hope so.”
Blanche sighed, “Hey, don’t wait. The food’s getting cold. Let’s eat first.”
The three women were halfway through the meal when the door to the study finally opened. Kevin gloomily went straight up the stairs. How could Bella have the appetite to eat any more? She put down her chopsticks and said, “I’ll go see him.”
She chased Kevin to the bedroom and saw him standing in front of the window, so she hurriedly begrudgingly handed over a cigarette, “Smoke one.”
Kevin took it and was about to light it when she snatched his lighter, “I’ll do it.”
While lighting the cigarette for him, she ridiculed, “Is it not bad having a wife as considerate as me?”
Kevin didn’t say anything, and the atmosphere was still just as cold. So she had to be wise enough to shut up and sit on the edge of the bed to contemplate with him.
After another long period of time, she couldn’t help but speak up, “You’ve been standing for over an hour. How much longer do you really need to stand?”
Kevin was still silent, so she had to walk up to him, tugged on his sleeve and said, “I’m talking to you. Can’t you just pay attention to me?”
He suddenly hugged her tightly, and after being startled for a few seconds, Bella asked woodenly, “What did Dad tell you? Why do you seem like you’re in a bad mood?”
“No matter how bad I feel, as long as You’re with me, I’ll be at ease.”
After saying that, he leaned down and kissed her delicate red lips with deep affection…
The next day at noon, when Bella came out of school, she rushed straight to the Women’s Hospital where her mother-in-law had taken her last time.
When she found the doctor who had seen her last time, she hadn’t even had time to explain the reason for her visit before that doctor said, “If you don’t come, I’m going to call you.”
“What’s wrong? Is the test result bad?”
She inexplicably began to feel uneasy.
The doctor’s expression was quite heavy, pulling out two of Bella’s from a stack of checklists and handing them to her in front of her, saying seriously, “You should be prepared. Don’t have too much mental burden.”
The doctor’s words were like a bomb thrown into Bella’s head. She snatched the checklist from the doctor’s hand, and with a loud bang, the bomb exploded…
“Primary infertility?” She shakily questioned, “What does that mean?”
“In layman’s terms, you are incapable of procreating.”
“No way, absolutely no way. How could I not have the ability to have children? Why am I infertile when I’m obviously healthy?!!!”
Bella was very emotional, and she came near to a breakdown. This kind of test result was something she couldn’t accept.
“Miss Burne-Brown, calm down. In medicine, there is no cause for primary infertility, but now that medicine is advanced, it is possible to cure even a terminal illness, let alone childbirth. What you need to do now is to calm down, and then proceed with some high-tech treatment.”
“You have the wrong results of this test, right?”
Bella raised the checklist in her hand and slapped it on the table, “This test result is definitely wrong!”
“If you have doubts about our test results, you can review them again at another place, and we’re not the only hospital in B City anyway.”
“I’ll review it, and if your test results are really wrong, I definitely won’t let you go easily!”
Bella turned away in anger. The sky was gloomy, but her mood was gloomier than the sky. How was she going to calm down? She had been looking forward to having a child like Kevin, but now she was suddenly told that she had no fertility. It was like taking a knife and stabbing it into her heart without warning, making her painful.
“No, absolutely not. I can’t cry. They checked the wrong one. I’ll just find another one to review it…”
Bella muddled down the street, repeatedly warned herself not to cry, but the tears still could not stop. She simply did not dare to think about what she should do if the test result was correct?
The only belief she held on to now was that the result was wrong. Kevin just favored her. So nothing could go wrong.
She came to the city’s third-class hospital and offered to check if she had any problems with her fertility. The examination equipment here was very advanced. She only needed to wait three hours to overturn the results of the Women’s Hospital.
These three hours for Bella were longer than thirty years, and she felt more painful than the abuse she suffered in the Burne-Brown family during the ten years from her age of twelve to twenty-two. She sat alone curled up in the corner of the obstetrics and gynecology department. Looking at expectant mothers one after another to come for a birth check-up, she was heartbroken once again. No one knew how much she longed for such a day for herself. Nor did anyone know how much she envied the women who were about to become mothers.
Not wanting to be subjected to such mental torture again, she left the lobby of the obstetrics and gynecology department and came out onto the lawn outside the hospital in a daze, the scent of osmanthus wafting through the air, but why should the smell of sadness be mixed in? She gradually found a stool to sit down. From time to time, there were patients passing by, and on their faces, there were traces of suffering. She sympathized with them, but she sympathized with her own miserable fate and life. How much pain and suffering would she have to go through before she could return to the happiness of ordinary people? Before the age of 24, revenge was her only goal. After the age of 24, her ultimate goal was to live a happy life with Kevin and give birth to a lovely boy and a girl. But now, a ruthless checklist shattered all the beautiful fantasy. She suddenly felt that her miserable life without value for survival.
“Miss, can you help me hold the baby?”
A woman in her late thirties sat next to her holding two children, both looking exactly alike, and she took one of them and asked woodenly, “They’re twins, aren’t they?”
“Well yeah, it’s exhausting. I gave birth to two children at once and both of them also have aneurysms. They’re going to have surgery tomorrow, so I carried them over today to be hospitalized first.”
As the woman breastfed the children, she told her about the hardship of bringing them up.
The woman didn’t know that this hardship she was talking about was happiness that couldn’t be touched by Bella.
She was startled to look at the delicate little face of the child in her arms. Her fingers were trembling and she wanted to touch. But her hand was shaking too much. Her tears were fluttering down, dripping on the child’s delicate face. The child was frightened and cried. The woman panicked and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Bella faced the woman’s question, tears streaming down her face, but she couldn’t say a word. As if realizing what, the woman took the child, looked at her helplessly, sighed and held the child away.
As the woman left, she bit her lips tightly to prevent herself from crying out, and comforted herself over and over again: I don’t need to envy others and to be too negative. The results have not come out. I have at least half hope.
Because of the support of this half hope, she finally survived the painful three hours. she would probably never forget for the rest of her life the apprehension and nervousness she felt when she went to hear the test results.
“Unfortunately, there may be some issues with your fertility, and the initial diagnosis is primary infertility.”
She almost passed out. Her world was plunged into a moment of immense darkness, and God had finally and cruelly closed her window as well as her door, leaving her in a dark and desperate hell.
Tears drowned her like a dike flood. At the very bottom of hell, time receded from before her eyes, as if she was back in that summer night nineteen years ago. The mockingbird cried happily in the trees. The stars winked in the sky. She lay in her mother’s arms, enjoying the cold air from her mother’s worn fan, listening to her mother whisper, “The happiest thing in this life is to give birth to a child like you, well-behaved and obedient, so that life won’t be so lonely and isolated. When you grow up, you must have a daughter like that too, so that you won’t be so lonely…”