Chapter 7
He also looked happy.
I stared at the image longer than I should have.
Then I closed it.
My children were born six weeks later.
Thirty-two weeks and two days.
Noah arrived first, furious and red-faced.
Ethan followed less than a minute later.
Grace came third.
Lily came last and frightened everyone by remaining silent for four terrifying seconds before releasing the smallest, angriest cry I'd ever heard.
I sobbed.
“All four?”
A nurse bent close.
“All four.”
I didn't see them properly until the next day.
They were impossibly tiny.
Noah had dark hair.
Ethan had Julian's chin.
Grace's fingers curled around mine so tightly that I laughed through my tears.
Lily opened gray-blue eyes and stared at me with an expression that already looked suspiciously like Margaret Whitmore's.
“Don't do that,” I whispered.
The nurse smiled.
“What?”
“Look like your grandmother.”
She assumed I was joking.
For eleven weeks, the hospital became our whole world.
The babies gained weight.
Learned to feed.
Learned to regulate their temperatures.
I learned monitors, medication schedules, oxygen levels, and the subtle differences between four different cries.
I also learned something I should have understood years earlier.
Family was not a name.
It was who showed up at three in the morning.
Rachel flew in twice.
My mother stayed for seven weeks.
My younger brother, Daniel, took unpaid leave and slept on my sofa.
When I finally brought all four babies home, we celebrated with takeout pasta eaten from cardboard containers because nobody had energy to cook.
There was no champagne.
No photographers.
No trust announcement.
Just four bassinets.
A sink full of bottles.
And more love than I knew a two-bedroom apartment could hold.
For almost two years, that was enough.
I never lied to myself about Julian.
There were nights when one of the children would make an expression so exactly his that the ache surprised me.
Noah frowned like Julian when concentrating.
Ethan hated bananas.
Grace loved music.
Lily fell asleep only when someone rubbed circles between her shoulder blades.
Julian used to do the same thing when I had migraines.
DNA lived in strange places.
Sometimes in bone structure.
Sometimes in habits no one had taught.
I kept photographs.
Doctor records.
Birth certificates.
Not because I planned a confrontation.
Because someday my children would ask.
I intended to tell them the truth in a way that belonged to them, not to the Whitmore family mythology.