Her Life
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Nina Mayes was the second-born daughter of Louis and Nadia Mayes, and was raised in an upper middle-class suburb. Her upbringing was not always happy, and Nina was always shy. Her older sister Katy coped in other ways and always loved teasing Nina and getting her into situations that embarrassed her. Even so, Nina knew that her sister loved her and looked out for her, and Nina would always take her advice and try and please her even if Katy always tended to be really nosey into Nina's business.
Nina Mayes met Daniel Phelps in junior high school at an evening dance night when he shyly came up to ask her to dance. Being that Nina had watched the eighth-grader Daniel from afar in classes, it was almost too good to be true that he would ask a wallflower like her. Of course, she said yes and enjoyed a couple dances with him, then spent the days trying to figure out what the ‘catch’ was. There wasn't any except for that awkwardness junior high kids have. They sort of went their own ways after that dance, but it seemed they still had some attraction even if they tended to keep a wide orbit with each other.
It wasn’t until Nina was a junior in high school that they started going out. Their first date since that dance in junior high was another dance…Homecoming. He was pretty handsome and was a star running back on the school football team, so Nina thought he would have his pick of one of the ‘hot, popular’ cheerleaders. Nina herself was a cheerleader having made the team with her agility and skill and not by her looks or popularity. It was made crystal-clear that she was not part of the ‘in’ clique, and that Daniel ‘was just playing around with her’. So yes, Nina did have reason to suspect something. When Daniel was late to pick her up, she thought it was likely a setup for her to be stood up. But he did genuinely run out of gas because his old muscle car didn’t have a working fuel gauge. The Prom was actually a wonderful experience, and the party after was a rather wild. Nina was pretty wasted when she lost her virginity in Daniel’s car in the early hours of the morning.
Daniel and Nina weren't exactly the stereotypical high school couple but were close. Daniel was a star running back on the school football team and Nina had made the cheerleading team her junior year despite not being part of the 'popular girl' clique (she was considered a "quota'd charity case" by the squad leader). Everyone thought her relationship wouldn't last past Daniel graduating and going to college (he was a year older than Nina), but despite the distance, Nina remained true to him because she saw them together forever. When Nina graduated high school, she was elated when Daniel proposed to her, and in September they were married.
They both finished college and they both got jobs and Nina and Daniel's marriage appeared to be textbook happy. They had been married five years when Nina found out she was pregnant. That day was November 13 2006 when she got really sick and couldn’t shake the stomach flu. She finally took a test, and despite her strict adherence to her birth-control pill schedule, she fell into that .3%. It wasn’t that she and Daniel didn’t want children, just not yet. They had plans! But since it was fated, they both made adjustments to their lives and prepared to be parents as they embraced bringing a baby into the world. Nina had a fairly smooth pregnancy, and all signs said the baby was healthy, and Nina went nearly full-term.
But after Sarah was born, tragedy struck when she died three days later from complications from a heart defect. The pain of this loss was hard for them both to bear, but they seemed to remain well-bonded, supported each other, and weathered the emotional storm together. Yet it was clear that Nina and Daniel did not completely heal mentally from the tragedy, and at a follow up doctor’s appointment, Nina was told that she was likely not able to have children after the hard birth. She was already shattered internally, and this just crushed the pieces into dust inside her, but Nina kept up the appearance of holding it together stoically on the outside. She chose to ignore any further testing and she never mentioned the news to Daniel, and they both tended to not talk about Sarah after the funeral.
This was when the first fracture appeared in their marriage, and it started to slowly grow after that. They carried on with life though they seemed to be on two different continents within their house, drifting slowly apart. Daniel threw himself into his job and gained a nice promotion as Nina worked at a small bank and was made operations manager. When Daniel mentioned he wanted for them to try for another baby, Nina quietly agreed, keeping up the facade and never mentioning she was damaged goods.
It was after they had been married ten years that those fractures developed into cracks, and they were starting to appear to each other. It was when they were buying their house at 13 Cedar Grove Lane that they had started arguing over the place. It seemed things would remain on the rails as they closed the deal and moved in, but it was clear that things unsaid and undealt with while the passage of time in the comfort of familiarity with each other was leading to the flame to slowly wane. They were drifting apart and as attempts to have a child failed, their intimate life together also waned.
When Nina left it up to Daniel to organize their twentieth anniversary, then realized as the day approached that he had totally forgotten as he had done so the last four years, something broke inside Nina. She met with her big sister Katy and they had long heart-to-heart sisterly talk. Now Katy was never Daniel's biggest fan, so any sisterly advice Nina got would have been skewed. Nina knew her sister though, and she took her words under advisement. What was clear was Nina was asking herself if this was all there is in life.... then, the day of her twentieth anniversary came...
