“Your father’s attorney has nothing to do with our marital insurance,” Adrian snapped, his face darkening as his sales cadence vanished. “You are being paranoid, Evelyn. You have been in this bed for two days while I am trying to keep Vale Capital from going under.”
“Then let it go under,” I said, looking him directly in the eyes.
“You think you can just retreat into your family name whenever things get difficult,” he said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “But you are my wife now, not Jonathan Ashford’s protected little girl.”
He snatched the blue folder from the bed, his grip so tight the cardboard buckled under his thumb.
“We will talk about this at home,” he said, his mouth twisting into a thin line. “If we still have a home by Friday.”
He brought her here because he wanted me to see what my signature was buying.
He turned on his heel and strode out, the heavy oak door swinging shut behind him with a solid, final click.
The quiet hum of the infant monitors filled the room once more, the green lights blinking in the dark corner.
The night passed in three-hour increments of waking, feeding, and checking the blue plastic bands on my sons’ wrists. I had never known quiet could hold so many distinct sounds, from the dry rattle of the heater in the corner of Room 402 to the rhythmic click of the saline drip.
The room smelled of hospital antiseptic and the sharp, clean scent of the sheets the night nurse had changed before the shift rotation. A thin band of yellow light from the hallway crept under the door, casting a long, narrow shadow across the gray linoleum floor.
By eight o’clock the next morning, the fog of the anesthesia had lifted, leaving a cold, sharp ache in my lower abdomen that made even shifting my pillows a chore.
Nurse Clara, a tall woman with quiet eyes and a faded blue scrub top, wheeled the triple bassinets closer to the left side of my bed. The plastic wheels squeaked against the polished tile, a small, domestic sound that made the white walls feel slightly less sterile.
Noah’s blanket had tiny blue stars, Leo’s had green stripes, and Samuel’s was solid white because the nursery had run out of patterned ones. They were small, but their breathing was steady, the monitors showing green lines that rose and fell in unison.
