The room went silent so violently that I actually heard my own heart monitor skip a beat. The rhythmic beep-beep-beep faltered, mirroring the sudden, icy drop in my chest.
Five newborns slept under the warm, hum-shielded lights of the neonatal intensive care unit. Their tiny chests rose and fell in unison, their little fists curled tightly under their chins like they were holding onto secrets the world wasn’t ready for. I was still bleeding, still trembling from the massive physical trauma of the surgery, and still half-drugged on a cocktail of painkillers.
Yet, the fog in my brain vanished the moment my husband, Richard, took a stumbling step backward. He looked at the five incubators as if the fragile lives inside them were laced with poison.
“Richard,” I whispered, my throat raw from the intubation tube they had just removed. “Don’t do this. Please.”
His mother, Victoria, stood right behind him. She was impeccably dressed in a tailored Chanel suit and a string of South Sea pearls, draped in a white sterile coat she had absolutely no right to wear inside my private recovery room. She looked at the babies, then slowly turned her gaze to me. Her smile was sharp enough to cut through bulletproof glass.
“My son is a Sterling,” Victoria said, her voice dripping with generations of inherited arrogance. “He is the heir to a Boston real estate empire. He will absolutely not raise another man’s children. This is an embarrassment.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows, the stitches in my abdomen screaming in protest. “They are your grandchildren, Victoria. They are his.”
Richard finally looked at me, and he laughed. It wasn’t a loud, angry sound. It was worse. It was hollow, cold, and utterly devoid of the man who had kissed me at the altar two years ago.
“I should have listened,” Richard muttered, running a shaking hand through his perfectly styled hair. “When my friends warned me about marrying outside of our circle. When my mother told me you were nothing but a gold-digger looking for a permanent payday. I defended you.”
