Our Lives
I’d first walked down the aisle with Matt at the age of five. And after that, fate had a rollercoaster of a ride in store for us.
On the screen, a little girl in a long white dress and flowers in her hair began walking down the aisle. She’d linked arms with a little boy dressed in a suit, and when she caught sight of a camera, she grinned.
‘You were cute,’ my friend Anna said.
We were watching a video of her wedding to her husband Angelo. I was the flower girl in the long dress, and Angelo’s nephew Matt was the pageboy in his little suit.
We could hear all the guests cooing as we held hands, because I was only five and he was six.
I’d loved that day, getting all dressed up and wearing make-up for the first time. It had made me feel so special.
Anna and Angelo were close friends of my parents, and we often watched their wedding video when we visited.
I’d see Matt too at family events and we got on really well. Now, aged 14, I had a crush on him.
As we went through the video again, Anna said: ‘Wouldn’t it be so cute if you two ended up together?’
So I worked up the courage to ask Matt on a date to the cinema.
‘That’d be great,’ he replied. We had fun and became boyfriend and girlfriend. ‘You two are going to get married one day,’ our families kept telling us.
But the pressure became too much and, after a month of going out, I realised I wasn’t ready for a relationship.
I didn’t want to upset Matt, so I asked my little sister Bianca: ‘Can you break up with him for me?’
She did, and afterwards she said: ‘He seemed really sad.’
That made me feel terrible.
Matt and I remained friendly, and we’d still see each other at family events.
Then, when I was 18, I visited Angelo’s for Easter to discover Matt wasn’t there, and something unexpected happened.
I found myself feeling disappointed.
That’s when I realised I still had feelings for him.
I asked his mum for his number, then sent a text.
After some back and forth, we arranged to meet up.
The moment I saw him, I ran up and kissed him. And he kissed me back. ‘I never want us to be apart again,’ I told him.
‘Neither do I,’ he said. As the years went by, Matt and I talked about getting married and having a family.
But then I started suffering severe pain in my abdomen, and went for an ultrasound.
‘It looks like there’s a large mass,’ the nurse said. ‘We need you to come back for further investigations.’ My heart sank and
I assumed the worst. I phoned Matt and my mum, panicking. ‘What if it’s serious?’ I asked.
They did their best to comfort me but further tests revealed I had s
