Chapter 2
921 Words
[The Test That Changed Everything]
I took the test on a Thursday morning, six weeks after the night that wasn't supposed to matter.
I had told myself the nausea was stress. I was in the middle of my intern year at St. Catherine's — the most grinding twelve months of a medical career, the year that separates the people who can function on three hours of sleep and cold hospital coffee from the people who cannot — and stress nausea was not only plausible but practically on the rotation schedule.
I told myself this for three weeks. Then I took the test.
Then I took three more tests.
They all said the same thing.
I sat on the bathroom floor of my new apartment — a studio in Brooklyn that I had moved into ten days after finding Marcus and Vanessa together, subletting from a nurse I knew from the hospital, small and clean and smelling faintly of someone else's life — and I held the fourth test and looked at the two lines.
I was twenty-four, in intern year, recently separated from my husband who was already — I had learned from the mutual friend who apparently had no concept of a decent cooling-off period — living openly with Vanessa. I had seventeen hundred dollars in my personal savings account. I had a studio apartment with someone else's furniture and a medical career that was seven years and approximately three hundred thousand dollars of debt in the making.
I was also, it emerged, not carrying one child.
The ultrasound was performed by Dr. Chen, who was my attending and who looked at the screen with the professional composure of someone who has seen every possible configuration of human biology and arrived at peace with all of it.
'Three,' she said.
'I'm sorry?'
'Three.' She moved the wand slightly. 'Triplets. All appearing healthy at this point. We'll want to monitor closely given the multiple gestation, but—' she continued talking with the calm efficiency of someone delivering information, and I listened from a great distance, the way you listen to music playing in another room.
Three.
I thought about the man with the grey eyes and the three words on a notepad and the city spread out below us like a spilled galaxy.
I thought: I don't even know his name.
What followed was the longest year of my life. I finished intern year six months pregnant, earning the specific complicated respect of colleagues who simultaneously admired the determination and questioned the judgment. I delivered — safely, after a difficult thirty-six weeks that cost me my ability to eat anything that wasn't crackers and ginger tea for four months — three children on a Tuesday morning in February.
Ava. Leo. Mia.
Ava came first, furious and efficient, seven minutes ahead of the others. Leo came second, blinking at the hospital lights with an expression of absolute philosophical calm that has not changed substantially in four years. Mia came third, already looking around as if taking inventory of a situation she expected to be substandard and intended to manage.
They were the most extraordinary things I had ever seen.
I did not tell Marcus. I did not tell Vanessa. I did not file for full divorce until Ava, Leo, and Mia were three months old and I had my bearings sufficiently to deal with lawyers. Marcus, I learned through those same lawyers, was not particularly interested in contesting anything — he signed the papers with what I was told was indecent speed, which answered several questions I had been carrying for a long time.
My mother came from Ohio for three months and kept me alive through the fog of three newborns and a residency I had deferred but not abandoned. My father wired money every month with a note that said only 'no arguments' because he knew I would argue. I held on.
Four years passed.
Ava, Leo, and Mia became people — distinct, opinionated, exhausting, hilarious, the absolute center of everything. Ava was fierce and organized and had her father's grey eyes. I noticed this. I noted it and filed it in the compartment marked 'things I am not dealing with' and moved on.
I completed my residency. I specialized in pediatric oncology, which people always said was the hardest specialty and which I chose because the hardest things, in my experience, were the ones most worth doing. I published a paper. I joined a research team.
And then, on a Monday morning in October, I got a job offer that I needed for the research funding it came with — a consulting position with Cole Enterprises, whose foundation funded three pediatric cancer research programs I was working with.
I accepted. I googled the company. I read the company profile, the recent press coverage, the founder's biography.
I stared at the photo on the About page for a very long time.
Grey eyes. A face that a sculptor would choose to demonstrate precision rather than warmth. A bio that said: Ethan Cole, 32, founder and CEO of Cole Enterprises, Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus, net worth estimated at four point two billion dollars.
The photo was captioned with a quote: 'I don't believe in coincidences. Everything that matters is built.'
I closed the laptop.
I sat in my kitchen while Ava and Leo argued about whose crayon was whose and Mia calmly appropriated both sets and reorganized them by color.
Three children with grey eyes.
Four years.
Monday morning.
- Writer
