Chapter 1 - The Triple Heartbeat
Madison’s fingers dug into my elbow like steel clamps.
She turned the ultrasound report around with trembling hands, pointing at the bottom paragraph printed in bold black ink.
"Look at the imaging notes, Claire," Madison whispered, her voice shaking violently. "Look at the fetal count."
I looked down through a haze of tears.
My vision cleared just enough to read the words stamped beside three tiny, distinct black shadows: Tri-chorionic gestation confirmed. Three distinct fetal heartbeats detected.
Triplets.
For five years, Vincent and I had visited fertility specialists across the country.
Every failed round had left me weeping into my pillow while Vincent grew colder, treating our empty nursery like a failed corporate acquisition.
He had convinced me that the defect was mine.
He had let his mother call me broken at Thanksgiving dinners while he quietly checked his phone under the table.
Now, my body was carrying three separate lives.
And twenty feet behind me, the father of those babies was kneeling on the linoleum floor, catching his sobbing mistress as nurses rushed in with a wheelchair.
"Vincent, my heart hurts!" Sophia wailed, clutching at his tailored lapels.
Her wrist caught the fluorescent lighting, flashing the eighty-six-thousand-dollar diamond bracelet he had snapped shut around her skin the night before.
Vincent didn't look at her wrist.
His eyes were locked across the corridor, burning straight into mine, his face pale as fresh bone.
He tried to stand up to run after me, but Sophia’s fingernails dug through his shirt, dragging him back down to the tiles.
"Mr. Moretti, we need you to step back so we can evaluate the patient!" a nurse commanded, wheeling a crash cart between us.
"Claire!" Vincent’s voice broke across the chaos, sounding raw and panicked. "Don't walk out that door! Talk to me!"
I folded the paper carefully into quarters.
I slipped it into my leather tote bag and looked Vincent directly in the eyes.
There was no rage left in my expression.
There was only a vast, freezing void where five years of devotion used to live.
"You chose your meeting, Vincent," I said, my voice carrying cleanly over Sophia’s staged sobs. "Now finish it."
I turned my back on him and walked out into the crisp morning air of downtown Chicago.
Madison hailed a cab, shoving me into the backseat before Vincent could break free from the hospital staff.
As the taxi pulled away from the curb, I saw Vincent burst through the glass sliding doors into the street, his tie crooked and his jacket flapping in the wind.
He waved frantically at the driver to stop.
I looked straight ahead and rolled up the tinted window.
"Where are we going?" Madison asked, wrapping her hand over mine as the cab merged into the riverfront traffic.
"To the bank," I answered, wiping the remaining moisture from my cheeks. "And then to my lawyer's office before he freezes the accounts."
Vincent thought I was the quiet, submissive girl who had abandoned her master’s degree to iron his shirts and manage his dinner parties.
He had forgotten that before I met him, I had graduated top of my class in corporate forensic accounting.
May you like
He wanted a divorce war.
I was going to give him an eviction notice from my life.
