“You would’ve been three years old today,” Seungri said softly, brushing a few pieces of grass off the white marble headstone that marked the tiny Western style grave.

The breeze blew the scent of the bouquet of flowers he held into his nostrils and the scent took him way back.

It was the same scent that had filled the café where he’d gone to meet his girlfriend that day after receiving a message from her that could only have been described as pleading and frantic. He showed up a couple of minutes late and immediately spotted Sora sitting at her usual table in the back with her chair backed against the wall and her hands locked together on her lap. She looked weird and it wasn’t until he had entered the warm room that he realized why: she was pale, her warm caramel skin now as white as the cloth on the table that she occupied.

That set his pulse rocketing off. He had never seen her like this. Her cherry colored lips and jet black hair were a stark contrast to her pallor and he could see the vein at her neck jumping as he neared her. She was so focused on her interlocked hands that she was started when he sat down in the chair across the table from hers. Her hazel eyes were glittery with panic as they met his and his breath left him as if he’d taken a hit to the solar plexus. He reached for her hand and she actually flinched. He persisted and laced their fingers together, suppressing a shudder as her ice cold skin touched his fingers.

“What’s wrong?” He had to force the question out. He hadn’t really wanted to ask because he’d gotten the feeling that once she told him the answer, he wouldn’t be able to un-hear it, and he was seriously afraid that it was the only kind of news that ever came from these “We need to talk” things: bad. Bad like her having cancer and only having a month to live. Bad like the kind of thing that would break his heart and kill his soul. She looked up at him, hauled in a breath and then, in a voice so low that he just barely heard it, she gave him an answer.

“I’m pregnant.”

“What?” Seungri shook his head. The did she just say?

She kept silent, head bowed with her gaze locked on the tile floor. She stayed so still that she could have passed for a statue.

“Are you serious?” He pulled his hand away from hers and pushed his chair back, not sure if he was going to get up and walk away or just sit there until the world ended. He didn’t know what to think or how to react. His mind was a computer and what she’d just said was the virus that crashed its hard drive. He was, literally, drawing a blank. He couldn’t think.

Eventually, she had responded in the affirmative. He, operating on autopilot, asked if she was sure. She’d reached into her DIY tote bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers and two bottles of pills, handing them over to him silently before collapsing back against her chair and closing her eyes. His eyes flew over the papers. He picked out the important words: pregnancy confirmed. He glanced at the pill bottles. One was folic acid, the other prenatal vitamins. He went back to the papers and read slower this time. He sighed and ran a hand down his face when he finished. She was two months in. His gaze flew to her stomach as the thought sank in. She was two months pregnant. In another seven months, there would be a screaming baby to worry about.

She felt his stare and her eyes flew open. She crossed her arms over her abdomen in a protective manner and searched his expression.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and they were fighting. He was slamming the door of the apartment behind him and she was falling into a heap of misery on the floor as he left, her face red with anger and emotional distress, her tears dripping onto the carpet they’d chosen together. The argument had flared bright and burned hot and she was feeling singed.

Seungri went straight to the bars. He glided in, slid into a stool and threw back shots until all he could feel and think about was the burn of the liquor going down his throat and the sensation of the alcohol hitting his bloodstream, until his brain’s record unstuck and he stopped hearing himself shouting at her. He drank until the lights swam and still the undercurrent of his mind carried the rotting flotsam that was his silent wish, reminding him over and over that he’d prayed, even if just for a fraction of a second, that something would go wrong. That in his mind’s eye he had seen and relished the vision of her falling down a flight of stairs. It had been a thought born of anger and fear and some sick twisted part of him just wanted the ed up misadventure to end.

The rest of him wanted to pretend that it had never seen that image at all.

And so he did. He bought flowers and learned to make her favorite food and even bickered good-naturedly with her over what color they should paint the nursery since they had decided that they wanted to wait until the birth to find out the baby’s gender. They both pretended that the fight never happened and she learned that she could do things without him glued to her side. She learned not to complain about his frequent absences because he would feel guilty if she did and that guilt would quickly become an anger that lay there just fermenting until one day he would explode over some teeny tiny thing. She learned to lie. She learned to paste a beatific smile on her face and keep it there while her mind delved dark hallways of future possibilities. She learned to accept the trinkets he’d give her instead of apologies without letting on that she wanted nothing to do with them.

He was in Japan, showing support for GD’s One of A Kind tour, when he got a call. It was her mother, the person who hated him most in the world. His heart dropped to his feet when he recognized her voice on the other line and it kept dropping as she kept talking. Words were still coming through the phone’s speakers when he pulled the phone away from his ear but he’d heard all he needed to. Stillborn. A little girl with his nose.

He was never able to figure out how he got onto the airplane that took him back to Seoul that day. He had found GD and handed the phone to his hyung. He’d gone numb and all he could think of was her. He wondered if she’d be okay.

Her brother met him at the airport and they wordlessly traveled to the hospital. He was aware of sympathetic glances from the nurses and the hushed tone of the room as he walked through the door. His gaze locked on the small form in the narrow hospital bed and his breath caught in his throat. She was lying on her side facing the doorway with her eyes squeezed shut. Tears streamed from her eyes and her hands clutched a small green plushie she’d bought weeks before. It was supposed to be the baby’s first toy, she’d explained at the time. Now she was holding onto it for dear life.

The people in the room slipped out one by one until he was left alone with the girl in the bed. He reached for her hand and she recoiled from his touch, her eyes flying open. They were bloodshot and he felt guilt settle like a millstone around his neck as he recalled that once, just once, he’d wished there was no baby. He sat on the edge of her bed and patted her hair, trying to convince himself that he hadn’t somehow caused this, staying until the drugs the nurses had administered before his arrival knocked her out.

She’d cried in her sleep, too.

Seungri had never seen a coffin as small as the one they put the baby in. He kept wanting to yell at them to prop the lid open so she could breathe, or to put a nightlight in there because she’d be scared of the dark. All the emotions he’d been shoving away came down on him full force when he watched them lower the little casket into the ground on a damp day in June. He lost it when the first spade full of earth was thrown in. He tried, according to what he was told after the event by various family members and friends, to go into the grave and get the coffin out.

He fought the people who restrained him, tears dripping down his face as he screamed that his baby needed him. She was so little. Too little and fragile to be in that box all by herself in the cold and the dark. He’d been sedated after that and woke up in the dorm, with Sora curled up next to him. They sat on his bed and watched the sun disappear behind the mountains in the distance, the image blurred by their tears as they cried their hearts out.

The sound of a twig snapping drew him back to the present and he looked up to see Sora approaching with a children’s book in her hands. He placed his bouquet in front of the headstone and straightened.

“You got your name from a song. Daddy’s gonna sing it for you,” he announced with a shaky smile, stepping back before he began his acapella performance.

Sora sat near the headstone and cradled the little book as she watched and listened. She felt the loss all over again and had to blink back tears. When Seungri ended the song with closed eyes and a raised hand, they spilled down her cheeks. She patted the space opposite her and he plopped down, wiping off his own tears. Sora twined her fingers with his as she began reading in a soothing tone of voice like any mother elsewhere in the world would read a bedtime story. When the story ended, she closed the book and her fingers skimmed the marble of the headstone. She imagined she was smoothing down her daughter’s hair.

Seungri caught the gesture. “Happy birthday, Lucy,” he whispered, praying that she’d be able to hear him all the way from Heaven.

*** This is the song I based this scenario on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7sjrjiOYYQ. It helps if you listen to it while you read. It's also the song Seungri sang. ***