I believed my husband when he promised we would raise our triplets together. Six weeks after their birth, I was still recovering, barely sleeping, and doing everything alone. Then he announced that he had earned a two-week vacation, and I decided he wouldn’t leave with his perfect-father image intact.
“You really did this to me?!”
Ethan’s scream burst through my phone at four in the afternoon.
Tara startled against my chest. Timothy kicked inside his bassinet, and Tessa began crying before I’d even finished warming her bottle.
I lowered the volume with sticky fingers.
“What did I do, Ethan?” I asked.
A door slammed behind him.
Then I heard a man ask, “What is all that?”
Ethan had opened the suitcase in front of his friends.
Just as I’d planned.
“My clothes are gone, Kyra,” he snapped. “You packed diapers, feeding charts, that stupid shirt, and a baby book.”
“The book you promised to read.”
Tessa’s cries grew louder.
I shifted Tara to my shoulder and reached for the warm bottle.
“No, Ethan,” I said. “I stopped helping you look like a good husband.”
***
Six months earlier, I wouldn’t have believed those words could come out of my mouth.
Back then, Ethan had been the man who rubbed my swollen feet, brought me toast in bed, and talked to my stomach every night.
He’d begged for a big family.
When we learned I was carrying triplets, he cried harder than I did.
“We’re going to be a team,” he promised. “Every feeding. Every diaper. Every terrible night.”
At a barbecue during my seventh month, Ethan’s friends, Marcus and Ben, handed him a gift bag.
Ethan pulled out a black shirt that read:
“WORLD’S MOST EXHAUSTED FATHER.”
“I think I’m the one who’s going to be exhausted,” I said from my chair.
