Aretha's condition took a turn for the worse and I was called in by the specialist. One look at her and I knew she wasn't going to last the night. He left me alone by her bedside but all I could do was stand and stare.

She was all skin and bones having stopped eating over a month ago. She lay asleep looking deceptively peaceful, but I knew that was only a ruse, for when the pain came, it was like an avalanche. I didn't know when my feet moved me forward and I knelt in front of her and caressed her balding head.

She opened her eyes and in a moment of clarity, smiled at me. "I love you, Alex."

I smiled through the tears in my eyes, happy she had recognized me, but a few seconds later, she closed her eyes and drew her last breath.

"No, no, no, no, you can't leave me, you can't." I got a hold of her and shook her hoping she would wake and tell me 'surprise' like she used to do when she was hale and hearty.

Unfortunately, that never happened.

I broke down completely, sobbing and begging her to wake up and talk to me. That's how the nurses met me, cradling my wife's lifeless body in my arms. After awhile, they eventually had to beg me to release her so they could put her in the morgue.

That night I drove all the staff away from the house and locked myself up. I was inconsolable on Aretha's passing. For the next three days, I couldn't eat, neither could I sleep. I drowned myself in vodka and thereafter went about shattering things in the house. I knew what I was doing was wrong but I just couldn't help myself even if I tried.

A week later, Kelly broke into the house and tidied things up. I was like a dummy as I stared at her. She spoke but I could not hear her. She threatened but I was past caring. The pain was so sharp, so rife, I might as well have committed suicide and gone to be with Aretha.

Nothing Kelly did made sense to me. A part of me wandered how she had gotten into the house and even known about Aretha's passing in the first place, but I was too befuddled to ponder on it for long. She brought me food but I couldn't even look at it. I was too hurt, too pained, and too empty to think or function.

The love of my life had left me and all I wanted to do was die.

Kelly became my shadow. She didn't let me out of her sight. I guess she was scared I would kill myself. I almost did.

One day she coerced me to shave, because, and in her own words; I looked like a cave man. But when I stood in front of the mirror with the shaving stick in my hand, I had this sudden urge to put it to my throat and draw it across my skin from one end to another.

And I did.

Till this day, I have a red puckered scar right underneath my throat as a testament to that day.

Perhaps, Kelly couldn't stand my moping any longer because she sat me down one day to talk to me about Aretha's burial, at least she tried to. All I did was stare straight ahead into space. I didn't hear a lick of what she said. The only thing I remembered was her sigh and her telling me to nod if it was okay.

Funny, I don't remember the question she asked, still, I nodded.

And that's how days later, I found myself staring down at the yawning black hole a few paces in front of me with an already prepared speech in my hand.

As I read, my mind began to play out scenes from years before.

"I had just come from school, tired and hungry, coupled with the fact that my baseball game hadn't gone well. I was about opening the wicket gate to walk into the house when from the corner of my eyes I saw you. A sun kissed goddess with long legs and short kinky Afro hair. My hunger was forgotten momentarily as I trailed you with my eyes. You walked into the house directly opposite mine, blissfully unaware that Cupid had just shot me with his love arrow.

I trailed you everywhere and found out you were in the same high school as mine. You were actually a new student. I summoned the courage to approach you and begged you to tell me your name. You smiled, that lop-sided smile of yours that showcased your dimples to perfection. I knew that day I would make you my wife."

Tears filled my eyes and I struggled to blink them away. I looked up at the blinding sun and gathered the strength I needed. I felt Aretha's spirit was near, urging me and giving me the courage to continue so I went on reading.

"With nothing but a few cents to my name and a big dream, we walked down the aisle a few years later. When I saw you strutting towards me in your peacock yellow wedding dress, defying the norm of wearing a white wedding dress, it had cracked me up. I knew I had made the right decision to marry you."

"Baby, you brought me luck. After graduating with double honors in physiology and pharmacology, you coerced me to get a lab as a startup for my dream. Even then, you believed in me. You said I had stumbled on a cure, a cure to save the world and rid it once and for all of the debilitating cancer disease. You even went out on a limb for me by giving me your hard-earned savings. Savings you had judiciously amassed by working day and night jobs. And when I finally got a patent for the drug, you were beyond proud of me. Heck, you were even more proud of me than my own mother."

I was silent once again as I remembered how I had come home late to see the devastating report that changed everything. I felt my bodyguards behind me move back respectfully as they tried to give me some privacy.

I looked down at the paper and sighed because I still had some more to say to her.

"I just never knew that one day you would fall under this same disease I was trying to get rid of. If only you had fought hard, baby. If only you had fought and waited for me to actualize the last chemicals. If only you could have just held on, but it was too late. Too late for you."

"Someone once said we all have a six feet hole waiting for us in the ground. That person hit the nail on the head."

I shook my head in misery as tears filled my eyes.

"You weren't supposed to die, at least not just yet. You weren't supposed to go at such a tender age of just twenty eight. You were supposed to stay and give birth to our kids. You were supposed to stay so I could love and cherish you like I had always done, up till the very last minute. You were meant to grow old with me, to watch our kids grow into adults and let them do the looking after of us."

"Alas! You've gone to a place where I can't reach you, can't hold you, can't be with you, can't love you like I desperately want to."

My knees buckled and I found myself slumping. Had it not been for strong hands of my bodyguards that held me on either side, I probably would have joined Aretha in the ground they were presently lowering her body into.

A flash suddenly went off in my face, momentarily blinding me. I looked up to see several camera men jostling for space. My heart sank. I knew my face would be splashed all over the newspapers the next day.

I looked to my two trusted bodyguards standing alert beside me. "Get me out of here."

"Yes, boss." They guided me towards where my car was parked, but I was shocked to see it was already surrounded by paparazzi. I would never make it inside without virtually being eaten alive by them.

"Change of plans, boss, please follow me." Hugo, the one on the right said to me.

He removed the baseball hat on his head and put it on mine. I understood it was to disguise me, and it did the trick when I was told to walk way from them and past my car.

I did just that and the paparazzi did not follow me.

Once I settled inside a cab, a sob caught in my throat and despair crawled into my chest.

My wife was gone and I would never see her again in this life.

Loneliness and despair took their turn on me as I wept.

I woke the following morning wondering how I had gotten into my bed. Memories of the day before assailed me and despair hit me all over again like a flower in full bloom.

I closed my eyes as tears filled them. I was too damn emotional for a man. I squeezed my eyelids, feeling the pain flare up behind them. I sighed and opened them again. All around me, traces of Aretha had all but vanished. The matching golden filigree bedside lamps she bought, the two gilt high backed chairs in front of the bed, the pure cotton bedsheets she favored over the silk one's I preferred. Even her clothes, shoes and all of her ornaments, every single item, I had given to charity.

They were a painful reminder of what was meant to be, but wasn't.

My eyes widened when they fell on the curtains.

Who in their right mind would agree to have sunshiny yellow curtains?

Aretha, that's who.

She had always loved the colour yellow. Not just any shade of yellow. It had to be the exact shade of the sun - yellow with strains of burnt orange mixed into it.

I groaned and shut my eyes, once more willing the memories to stop. The strain of squeezing my eyes shut caused a headache to flare up. I opened them once again and they settled on the backdrop behind the curtains. Leaves, green and vibrant with dewy drops on each one, gaped at me. The quintessential evergreen forest.

Aretha's choice, yet again.

That had to go.

I clapped my hands and I heard the whir of the gears as it flipped, changing to another backdrop. I smiled as I saw the replacement. Snow-capped mountains topped with high peaks and sleek mounds.

That's better.

But the feeling only lasted for a few minutes, and it was back to the clawing despair in my chest.

"Wake up, Aretha."

"Good morning, Alex, what can I get you?" She came into view. A humanoid robot with a weight of eighty pounds of steel, Aluminium and Kevlar, equipped to carry on a conversation of human intelligence in three different languages. It was also equipped to carry and fetch things.

Believe me when I say it didn't come cheap.

"Go get my morning tea from the cook, and don't spill it."

"I will try not to, Alex." She replied before walking away.

I lay on my bed and tried not to think of Aretha. When I first got the robot, it was actually a gift for her. She would spend hours talking to it about anything and everything. When she asked me what name we should call it, I told her it was entirely in her hands.

I came back from work one day to see her referring to herself in the third person. I was shocked to know she had given the robot her own name. In order not to confuse them, she named it Aretha 2.

"I am sorry for your loss, Alex." The robot appeared by my bedside, a few minutes later, startling me.

When had it become this silent?

I realized I must have been too deep in thought to notice her arrival. It held a tea cup in it's hand and a newspaper in the other.

I collected the cup filed with tea and put it on the bedside table, then I snatched the newspaper from it's hand and threw it to the other side of the bed. I didn't need to see my face splashed all over the front page. I had already seen it all over the news on four different channels. That was enough for me.

"Does it hurt?"

I looked up to see the robot still standing by my bedside and looking at me. "Does what hurt?"

It blinked, those human look-alike eyes that seemed to see straight into my soul. "The death of Aretha1, my best friend."

I sighed, resisting the urge to tell it to go to hell. "I don't want to talk about it, please let me be."

"But you need to talk about it, Alex, bottling up your feelings will only make things worse for you."

Anger surged through me as I raised my forefinger in the air, but then it dropped limply to the bed. It was only a robot made to converse. It was just doing what it was meant to do. After all, it had watched me tending to Aretha all the while she was sick.

But I couldn't deal with any more talk of Aretha and her passing. What I needed was peace. I also needed to be left alone. I got up and opened up a section of its head where all the information lay in a microchip, and switched it off.

"Goodbye, Alex." It said before shutting down.

"Goodbye." I replied, already exhausted from talking too much.

I stared balefully at the tea cup I had placed on the bedside table. I didn't feel like drinking its contents anymore.

I took a shower and got dressed. Then I called Eric and told him to bring the car to the front. I had a business that needed me now more than ever.

*

As I walked into the employee's work area, slack jaws and open mouths assailed me. Most of them stood halfway and followed me with their eyes.

I walked to the middle and turned, anger surging through me. "Is there no one here who has manners? Did you all forget them at home?"

"I. . . I beg your pardon, Mr. Moore." A man standing close to me started. "We weren't expecting to see you at the office."

"And why is that?" I knew exactly why he had said it but I still wanted him to say it out loud.

That was if he dared to.

I think common sense took over them all, because choruses of good morning filled the air. I nodded and walked off towards my office. Hardly had I gotten inside when the door opened and a gasp echoed.

"So it's true?"

I walked to my chair, removed my jacket and draped it on it before addressing the person. "Good morning to you, Kelly."

"What are you doing here? You should be at home mourning your wife who was buried just two days ago."

"I thought you quit? What are you still doing hanging around and giving me motivational speeches?" I fired back.

"People are talking, by you know, they say it's not right for you to be here so soon after your wife's death."

The number of times I had gotten angry this morning, sailed through my mind, but I couldn't help the emotion when it came once again. "Exceva is literally the only thing that can save thousands of people from an untimely death, so I need to make sure it's perfected and up to standard. Aretha is already dead and buried, I don't need to moon around for the dead." I opened a file on my desk and began flipping through it. "Now go make yourself useful and get some work done. Oh, and em. . . tell Eric to get ready to take me to the lab."

I knew my words sounded cold and indifferent, but no one except me knew how much I suffered from Aretha's death.

A steely gaze took over her soft features. "This is not you. You've become a cold, unfeeling bastard, Mr. Moore."

She turned on her heels and walked out of my office, banging the door in the process.

Some time later, I found myself at my lab and the same shocked looks from my employees there. I was already over it. I walked through security, nodding curtly as they stammered out greetings. Luckily, no paparazzi had assailed me at the gate. That's probably because I gave Hugo some of my clothes to wear in order for him to paint the town red by visiting different bars.

So the tabloids were going crazy, painting me as a reckless, heartless bastard with no morals whatsoever.

That suited me just fine.

I placed my key card against the door and it beeped me in.

All around, employees, hard at work in various postures, stopped what they were doing and gaped at me, shock lining every corner of their faces. No doubt, the news must have gotten to them as well.

Simon broke away from his post and approached me. "Good morning, Mr. Moore, please accept my condo-"

"What's the progress with Exceva?" I cut him shut with a wave of my hand as I kept walking towards the section of the lab where I knew the solution that would eventually become Exceva was.

He jogged to catch up with me. From the corner of my eyes, I noticed a splash of red had risen on his checks but it quickly faded. "As you know, we changed the other compound which was unstable to thymoquinone because we found out it had hepatoprotective, anti-inflammatory, and -"

"Antioxidant properties. Yes, I know. Tell me something I don't know." I stopped directly in front of the shelves where the final solution was bottled.

If this thymoquinone remained stable with the other compounds in the solution, then I had on my hands a miracle working drug that would beat cancer in the early stages without causing any long or short term effect to the human body.

The solution had first been injected into rabbits with early stage cancer and it had stopped the growth. Next, we tried it out on monkeys who had been injected with cancers cells, and the solution had also stopped the growth.

We had yet to try it out on any human being, but I was informed by the team yesterday that we already had ten men willing to be injected with the solution. They had been diagnosed with cancer and it was still in its early stages. I already knew without a doubt, it would work.

As Simon reeled off the other reasons, I looked round at the lab.

This is it, Aretha, it's coming to life. We did this, baby, yet you're not even here to see it take shape.

"- Mr. Moore, Mr. Moore, can you hear me?"

As if from far away, I heard Simon call my name. I blinked and his face came into view. "Yeah. . . yes, I heard you, I just. . .good work, Simon. So when do you think we can send it to the manufacturing section?"

He squinted his eyes in thought. "All things being equal, if Thymoquinone keeps behaving itself, two weeks, tops, and in a month's time, we would have Exceva ready for the world."

He beamed proudly and I managed a smile. I was happy I had hired him. His expertise as head molecular biologist was invaluable. Infact, my whole team was highly invaluable.

My joy was however tainted when I remembered how I had messed up last week with the Department of justice's drug enforcement administration.

My phone vibrated in my pocket, startling me out of my thoughts. "Yes, Kelly, what is it?"

"I just got off the phone with Mr. Hendricks. He said the DEA will give you a second chance. In his exact words - Don't fuck it up this time around."

"Good job, Kelly, you'll get a raise at the end of the month." But she had already cut the call.

Bitch!

". . .so I punched him in the face."

"But why did you punch him in the face, Mr. Moore?" The policeman cocked his head like he was expecting to hear something along the lines of well, because after x and y, the next alphabet wasn't z.

I stifled the look of irritation creeping up on my face and answered tiredly. "Because he was badmouthing my wife and talking about her in a disrespectful way. You don't get to talk bad about a man's wife and expect not to get punched in the face."

The five police men looked at each other and nodded. "He's right." One of them announced.

"But where were you exactly?" The one in the middle asked.

I lifted my hands that were propped on my knees and put them on the table. The policemen close to my left must have thought I was going to bring out a weapon or something, because his hand went to the waistband of his trousers and hovered there. When he saw all I did was change posture, he relaxed, but I noticed his attention was drawn to my knuckles.

Part of the skin on them was scraped and they were caked with blood.

The paparazzo's blood.

It gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I opened my mouth and began to relay exactly why I was sitting in front of a five-man panel at the police station.

Three hours earlier, I had just left my lab. You know that feeling that comes with a sense of accomplishment?

Best feeling ever!

It bubbled to the surface and pushed the grief that kept plaguing me to the back burner. But it wasn't just a sense of accomplishment I felt, it was of relief as well. Relief that what I had set out to do would finally come to an end, and all my expectations would be established.

After ten long years of back breaking research and holing myself up with my team in the lab day in and day out, it was finally here.

The end result.

Exceva would be birthed.

Finally.

What tied everything up was the call I got from Kelly.

Naturally, the first person I thought to got to with the news was Aretha. I remembered she loved the colour yellow, and fresh yellow tulips were her favorite flowers. When she was alive, I always got them for her. I wasted no time, for once I left the lab, I went straight to the nearest florist.

Luckily, there was one on the same street the laboratory was situated at, so I headed there.

To my disappointment, the florist said she had just sold the last batch of yellow tulips and would I like to take the red or the pink one's?

I told her I didn't want any other colour apart from yellow. She advised me to go for the yellow roses instead, because they technically represented the same things which were peace, love and joy. I agreed and picked two bouquets of yellow roses.

While she was ringing them up, I noticed a coy smile appear on her face and I knew what would happen next. She looked up at me and smiled. "Forgive my asking this, but these roses are for a special someone, I believe?"

"Yes, they are." I replied a little curtly but followed it with a smile to tamper down my words.

She was quiet for a bit. Even though her fingers practically raced across the keypad, I wondered why she was taking so long in registering the flowers. I had the sneaky feeling she was stalling in order to ask me further questions. Then she looked up, and that coy smile sat wider on her face. "She must be something special."

It was my turn to smile coyly. "Oh, my wife definitely is, but now she's dead."

As her mouth fell open, I picked up the bouquet of flowers from where they lay on the counter and walked out. I wasn't ready to listen to her sympathy. Once I got into the car, I told Eric to take me to Rose garden cemetery where Aretha was buried. Some minutes later when we got there, I took out the package beside me as well as the two bouquets of yellow roses and left the car. Eric proffered his help in carrying them but I shook my head.

This was something I needed to do on my own.

As I walked forward, I felt the unwelcome presence of despair once again. It's cloying tentacles rose to take root in the centre of my chest and I felt the beginnings of a headache at my temples. I saw the caretaker in the distance but avoided his eyes. I didn't want anyone's company except Aretha's.

As I walked my way to the back where she lay, I saw a couple to my right. They spoke quietly as they knelt with their heads bowed low in front of a tombstone. I knew it wasn't any of my business, but I looked anyway. Anything to keep the despair at bay that was making it's way to my throat and clogging it.

My mouth fell open when I saw the year on the tombstone - I closed my eyes in pain for them. The person in the grave must have been their child. I shook my head to try to clear it of my sad thoughts and kept moving forward.

Aretha's tombstone reared up suddenly and I realized I had spaced out on the short distance here.

"Hello, my love." I placed the package on the ground and put the yellow roses on her tomb. "Short time no see." I chuckled mirthlessly.

"So I wrote a little something for you." I took out a piece of paper from inside my jacket. It was all crumpled and the ink had run into each other, messing up the words.

I couldn't for the life of me remember what I had written on it, but I'd be damned if I didn't try. I threw the crumpled paper away and cleared my throat like I was about to audition for a role in 'America's got talent.'

"Roses are yellow, violets are blue, you left me suddenly, but I'll always love you."

I shook my head, trying to rid it of the tears that sprang to my eyes. I smiled through them and got down on my hunches. I removed the bottle of wine and two glasses from the bag. After pouring a reasonable amount in each glass, I clinked the glasses and put her's on her tombstone.

"I got the best for you, baby-Don perignon. Remember you always liked to take it with strawberries. I didn't bring any through."

I took a sip from my glass and grimaced. "You know I'm more of a hard liquor person." I chuckled once again.

I had suddenly become sweaty so I removed my jacket and draped it across my knee. "Remember when we went baby shopping because we found out you were expecting junior?" That was actually the beginning of our troubles. "We both had baby fever, because we just found out it was a boy, so you dragged me - yes- I dare say it."

I lifted a finger in the air, smiling as I remembered. "You dragged me to that store. Not the one close to the house, the big departmental one on district road where they sell wholesale baby stuff. You said since we were going to be rich anyway, thanks to Exceva, we should buy a year's worth of baby things."

The smile faded from my lips. "Good thing we never made it there. The call came just on time, the call that changed everything, the call that was the beginning of the end."

I shook my head, remembering it all. The memories flowed into my head like hot larva, smouldering everything they touched. "Perhaps it would have been better we never got married, just like mum said." I shook my head, annoyed at the words I had just uttered. "I've never been able to understand why certain people are so hooked on the colour of people's skins."

I looked down at her tombstone. "To me you were perfect, my love, and you would always remain perfect in this life and beyond."

I looked up and noticed the glass I poured for her was still full. "Drink, my love." I stood and poured it in front of her tombstone.

"My condolences, Mr. Moore."

I turned round sharply to see a man pointing a camera at my face. A flash went off, momentarily startling me. "Are you for real now? Can't a man mourn in peace?"

"Sorry for your loss, once again, but just to be clear, was your wife African American, 'cause I wasn't quite sure when I saw her pictures. She looked quite light to me. I had an argument with my friends that she was probably a mixture of a white dad and a black mum, but between you and I, maybe she was just using a lightening cream?"

The audacity of this man was ludicrous.

I didn't think, I just acted. I flung myself across the short distance to him and unleashed all my pent up anger on him. Each time my fist landed on his face, anger surged through me. Anger that Aretha had not lived long enough, anger towards myself for being angry, and anger towards a society that couldn't just live in peace with other people irrespective of the colour of another person's skin.

Over and over again, my fist met with his face until someone pulled me away. By then, his face was a bloody mass of pink and red.

When I looked up to see who still held my hand, it was the man who I had seen kneeling in front of his child's grave.

"Wow!" One of the policemen exclaimed when I finished relaying what happened.

Lesson number one: Money and power earns respect. That was probably why I wasn't in a jail cell right about now.

"He shouldn't have said those words." One of the policemen shook his head.

"No! He definitely shouldn't have." Another one reiterated.

"Would you like to press charges?" Another one piped up suddenly.

I sighed and shook my head. "That won't be necessary. I just need to go back to my wife. We still have a pending discussion." I shrugged.

"Of course, of course." They all chorused.

And I walked out into the waning sunlight.