REAL-LIFE ‘I BURIED MY FIANCE... THEN GAVE BIRTH TO HIS BABY’

relationship broke down, she found herself a single mum – and her thoughts turned to her childhood crush once again.

“Thinking of him still made my heart flutter,” says Kelly.

When the pair bumped into each other at a local bar the sparks reignited instantly. Ricky – a railway maintenance worker – moved into Kelly’s three-bedroom semi in South Wales, UK. “He would spend all his money on me and the kids,” Kelly smiles. “He would play football for hours with Kailun and Jessie-lee and take them swimming. I had never felt so happy – and the children adored him, too. I realised Ricky wasn’t just my soulmate – he was the dad I had always wanted for my children.”

The pair tried for a baby of their own and soon welcomed a little boy, Jackson. Not long after, Kelly fell pregnant again – this time with a girl. “I had never seen him look so happy,” she says. But that’s when tragedy struck. Ricky had been a passenger in a car which collided with an articulated vehicle. He was killed instantly. Heavily pregnant with their unborn baby, Kelly faced the heartbreaking task of identifying his body. “I felt as if I had been stabbed through the heart when I saw him in the mortuary,” she says. “He looked like he was sleeping – his beautiful kind face still almost smiling.”

Preparing to farewell the man she loved most in the world, Kelly would visit him in the

“One beautiful life had ended and another life was making its way into this world – our daughter. I could hold on no longer. This baby was coming. The midwife led me away to the funeral car.”

With each contraction, tears flowed from Kelly’s eyes. “The undertaker said he had never in all his life taken someone to the maternity unit,” she remembers.

“I took comfort thinking that Ricky had made this happen. On the day I said goodbye to him, he gave me our daughter.”

Five hours later Kelly pushed a beautiful baby daughter out into the world. “I cried for Ricky. I wanted him by my side more then ever. Then I looked down at our daughter and I realised – there he was. She was the living image of him. “I called her Ava – a name he had chosen in the days before he died.”

Six years on, Kelly describes her daughter as “the most beautiful thing”.

“I will never, ever get over losing Ricky,” she says. “All I can do is be grateful for the three precious years we had together. They were the best of my life.”