2: 2
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then a soft laugh.
"You're talking nonsense again, Nia. Six years together, and you'd really throw that away?"
"I know it was hard on you, carrying the babies and giving birth. But Nell just lost her child. Have some compassion. You know I owe her."
Before he could finish, Nellie's syrupy voice came through the receiver.
"Xav, who is it...?"
Xavier covered the mouthpiece, his tone turning gentle.
"It's nothing. Just a telemarketer."
And with that, he hung up in a rush, without so much as a word of explanation to me.
Sitting on the couch in the waiting room, every part of me ached.
The C-section incision hurt. My chest hurt from my milk coming in. There wasn't a single spot on me that didn't hurt.
Except my heart. That, it seemed, had stopped being able to hurt at all.
"Alice Henson?"
Melvin Delgado pushed open the door in his suit, and something startled and pained flickered across his steady eyes.
He crossed the room in a few quick strides and took the baby from my arms.
"Let's talk in the lounge off my office."
Soon I was lying down in the private lounge inside Melvin's office.
Both babies had been settled in the arms of a woman at the firm who'd had children of her own, and they slept peacefully.
Melvin heard me out, then mapped out the evidence and paperwork we'd need with quick precision. After a long moment, he handed me a document.
"Are you sure? Once you decide to divorce, there's no going back."
I looked at that steadiness in him, the kind that put a person at ease, and nodded firmly.
"I'm sure."
Melvin had been my debate partner in college, always first in the whole law program.
We'd fought through countless competitions together.
After graduation, I married Xavier and he joined a top firm, and our paths never crossed again.
Just then my phone rang.
It was my mother.
I answered, and her scolding poured out before I could get a word in.
"Alice, have you lost your mind? Xav says you want to divorce him?"
"Don't go acting up and making a scene just because you had a baby. Whatever's wrong between a husband and wife, can't you two talk it out properly?"
I was shaking with anger, and with it, my chest began to swell and ache again.
"Mom, I just gave birth. Why don't you ask first whether I'm even okay?"
"You... what could possibly be wrong with you?" There was a guilty note in her voice. "Hasn't Xav arranged everything for you?"
"Nia, listen to me. Your brother needs to buy a house for the wedding, and he was twenty thousand short on the down payment. Xav wired over twenty thousand without a second thought. A son-in-law that generous and considerate, you couldn't find one if you searched the world over with a lantern!"
"Don't sit in the middle of your good fortune and fail to see it, and go ruining a good life for yourself!"
I hung up on her and gave a bitter little laugh.
Twenty thousand. That was all it took to buy out the thin scrap of feeling my mother had for me.
The ache of my swelling chest grew sharper.
In a daze, I found myself remembering the past, mine and Xavier's.
From campus to the wedding dress, six years in all.
He really had been good to me, so good that everyone envied us, and I'd believed we would make it to the end too.
But once Nellie appeared, everything changed.
It wasn't that I'd never suspected.
I'd once cornered him in the study, eyes red, and demanded:
"Xavier, that baby in Nellie's belly, is it yours or not?"
That night, he told me, very earnestly, about his history with Nellie.
They were from the same hometown, had grown up together as children. One year the wiring in the old house caught fire while he was napping, and Nellie was the one who ran in despite the danger, shouting him awake, saving his life.
"Nia, I owe her my life. She's pregnant now, dumped by that scumbag. I can't just leave her to fend for herself."
That day I'd even felt guilty for my own suspicions. Looking back now, the debt of gratitude was probably just an excuse.
There were so many ways to repay a life debt. Why did it always have to be me who gave way?
