That day, Alvin had learnt that some things were better off unknown. The rumours were easier to believe than the truth their mother had laid upon them. Greed and rage were easier to understand than charms and curses. They had something in common though – the inviolability of the law of cause and effect. His mother had explained her own actions as having been motivated by her love for her children. It did not make her feel any less guilty, Alvin could tell. He wondered why she had finally decided to come clean. Was she looking for validation from her children? From him in particular?
It took all his self-control not to lash out at her. Instead he bit his lips and stayed his tongue. She had suffered enough. And the past could not be undone. Neither she nor anyone alive seemed to know for sure if the clock on his own life was running out as it had on his father’s.
His mother’s revelation also made Alvin decide that love was an illusion. His parents and his grandparents, all their actions had been driven by what they called love for their flesh and blood. Everyone else was expendable. A selfishness that endured through time, since before his grandfather had been an unneeded second son of a merchant family in China. He would not participate in the charade if love was a fiction. There was no point.
Alvin’s resolve held until the day he laid eyes on Selina Ang. She carried a worldliness and maturity which Alvin found enchanting. Where he was the son of traditions and curses, she was a free bird on a path of perpetual forward motion. He asked her out to lunch on the final day of orientation. That had been followed by several more dates, visits to each other’s houses, and short getaways to Tioman and Phuket once they officially became a couple. By the time they both graduated, their mutual friends joked that it was high time to plan the wedding.
Selina herself wondered if Alvin had considered their longer term plans. Something was holding him back, that much had been clear halfway through their second year together. It had simply gone unaddressed. What Selina did not know was that he feared she would turn and run the moment she learnt his secrets. There were other outcomes but Alvin found them less palatable and far more horrifying.
Four years after graduation, Selina’s patience with her beau was at its limit. If Alvin was not willing to move forward, they were done. On Valentine’s Day in 2010, she issued him an ultimatum – share your life with me, or let me go. They had been midway through dinner at Equinox, on the 70th floor of the Swissotel Stamford, once the tallest hotel in the world.
She denied his request for more time.
The wedding was a lavish affair held in March 2011.
…to be continued
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