Chapter 6
I replied to none.
The divorce was finalized quietly.
The Whitmores kept their promise.
So did I.
No interviews.
No public accusations.
No embarrassing photographs outside courthouses.
The society pages wrote that Julian Whitmore and I had separated amicably after three years of marriage.
Six weeks later, Vanessa appeared beside him at a charity event wearing a gown tailored around her pregnant stomach.
The article called her Julian's longtime confidante.
I closed the browser.
By then, I was vomiting six times a day.
A quadruplet pregnancy didn't allow much room for heartbreak.
My body became its own demanding universe.
Rachel connected me with specialists.
One of them, Dr. Hannah Weiss, had trained in Zurich and recommended a maternal-fetal medicine team there with extensive experience in high-order multiple pregnancies.
Switzerland sounded absurd at first.
Then it sounded peaceful.
Most importantly, it sounded far from New York.
I rented a furnished apartment near Lake Zurich.
I did not buy a mansion.
I did not hire a staff.
The twelve million dollars stayed mostly untouched in conservative accounts while I lived more simply than I had during my marriage.
My mother came for the first month.
Rachel visited twice.
I worked remotely when I could, helping a European museum foundation restructure its American donor program.
And every morning, before the nausea began, I sat beside the apartment window and talked to my babies.
“I don't know what I'm doing,” I admitted one morning.
A faint flutter moved low in my stomach.
I smiled.
“Apparently none of you care.”
The pregnancy was difficult.
At twenty-two weeks, I was ordered to stop working.
At twenty-six, I spent two nights in the hospital because my blood pressure spiked.
At twenty-nine, Dr. Weiss warned me that delivery might happen sooner than we wanted.
I was terrified.
There were nights when I lay awake imagining four incubators.
Four sets of alarms.
Four tiny bodies I might not be able to protect.
During those nights, my anger at Julian faded into something less useful.
I didn't want revenge.
I wanted my children alive.
That became the center of everything.
Meanwhile, news from America reached me whether I wanted it or not.
Vanessa delivered three boys at thirty-four weeks.
James.
Oliver.
Henry.
The Whitmore family issued an announcement celebrating the birth of Charles and Margaret's first grandchildren.
There were photographs of Julian outside the hospital.
He looked exhausted and overwhelmed.