After the baby talk, Jaron wanted to know what we were doing in the harbor anyway. Hmph. Petty and nosy. I squared my shoulders and puffed up my chest as I told them about our business. I was so proud to let sims know about our little venture, even though we neither had a product nor a name.
“Well, that sounds great,” Diamond said. “I should probably get back to work. Oh, by the way, Laurant’s mother died. Call him or something.”
Is it bad the first thing I felt was dread about contacting him? I appreciated that nice message he sent after the wedding, but he made me nervous, honestly. I wanted to believe he had moved on and wouldn’t try anything stupid, but something inside told me to be wary of him.
I lost Ali at some point and searched for him. I found him in the back, watching TV and looking like he lost his best friend.
He too just found out he’d lost someone, an older gent he knew from work. Apparently he was more than a coworker. He was a mentor. When Ali first began working at that company, he was young and scrappy. Outside of his fancy shirts, Ali didn’t dress very well, honestly. And according to his story, he never did. But the elder saw something in him and took Ali under his wing. He taught him how to dress at work and even bought him a tie. All the promotions he received came from the tutelage he received from that sim. What a friendship! I imagined losing him felt akin to losing a parent.
I embraced him as tight as I could and suggested we went home. I gave him an abridged version of the speech he gave me the previous day. He could have anything he needed and do whatever he wanted except punch me because I couldn’t lose my husband and my mother in the same day. But he insisted on carrying on as normal, especially because I’d been so excited to get started that day. My feelings didn’t matter at the moment, and as anxious as I was to start the business, we really had the rest of our lives to do that. Still, he insisted.
“I don’t want to take this from you and be a sad sack,” he said. “New Year’s Day is supposed to be happy.”
“Ali, I’m pregnant! I’m so happy I could cry! We really don’t have to do this today.”
“I know. I want to.”
So, we went back to Willow Creek.
