CHAP 1 — Five Cries and One Closed Door
The maternity room was too bright.
That is what I remember most.
White walls. White sheets. White lights. Five tiny cries cutting through the air while nurses moved around me with exhausted smiles and urgent hands.
I had given birth to quintuplets at St. Catherine’s Hospital in Pittsburgh after thirty-one weeks of terror, bed rest, injections, monitors, and prayers whispered into a pillow.
Three girls. Two boys.
Olivia. Ethan. Grace. Miles. Ruby.
They were so small that my wedding ring could have slid over one of their wrists, though Peter and I had never made it to a wedding. We were engaged. We were supposed to marry in spring. He had painted the nursery yellow and cried the first time he felt all five babies kick beneath his palm.
At least, I thought those tears were love.
Then the nurse rolled the babies closer.
Peter stared down at them.
His face changed.
Not with wonder.
With suspicion.
“What?” I whispered.
He looked at the five newborns, then at me.
“These don’t look like mine.”
The nurse froze.
I thought pain medication had twisted the words.
“What did you say?”
Peter stepped back.
His mother, Marlene Wallace, stood behind him in a pearl necklace and a black coat, watching the bassinets like they were dirty laundry.
Peter pointed at the babies.
“These five don’t look a damn thing like mine. You betrayed me.”
I tried to sit up and nearly tore the stitches across my abdomen.
“They are yours.”
Marlene touched his arm.
“Peter, don’t let her trap you.”
Trap him.
Five babies struggling to breathe, and his mother called them a trap.
I reached for him.
“Please. Don’t do this.”
Peter’s eyes were wet, but not soft.
Angry.
Humiliated.
Afraid someone would laugh at him before he could punish me for it.
“I won’t raise another man’s kids.”
Then he left.
The door slammed so hard Grace startled in her incubator.
The nurse whispered my name, but I barely heard her.
I was staring at the door, waiting for it to open again.
Surely he would come back.
Surely no man could walk out on five newborns without asking one question, without waiting for one test, without holding them once.
But the hallway stayed empty.
That night, the nurses placed the babies beside me one at a time. I held them against my chest, five fragile lives breathing through tubes and blankets, and felt something inside me harden.
I was terrified.
I was alone.
May you like
But I was their mother.
“It doesn’t matter who abandons us,” I whispered through tears. “I will always protect you.”
