Chapter 1 - The Manhattan Bus Ride**
The rain hammered against the glass of the downtown bus like millions of tiny, furious fists. I sat huddled in a battered seat beneath the flickering fluorescent lights, holding the underside of my swollen belly with trembling fingers. I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant with triplets, and less than an hour earlier, my husband of five years had handed me a separation agreement, given me twenty-four hours to vanish from our penthouse, and walked out to catch a flight to Los Angeles with his actress mistress.
Ethan Mercer had left me with nothing. My personal bank accounts had been frozen by his corporate finance department the day before. My credit cards were declined. My clothes were soaked through from the sudden spring storm, and my phone battery was blinking its final, dying red warning.
*“Just get me through tonight,”* I whispered into the dark, blinking back hot, bitter tears that threatened to blur my vision completely.
Earlier that evening, in a glass-walled conference room forty stories above Park Avenue, Ethan had sat across from me checking his Rolex while I signed away my home, my dignity, and my future. When I asked him who Sabrina was, he had sighed with absolute irritation—not guilt, not shame, just the exhausted annoyance of a man dealing with a parking ticket. He told me he wanted efficiency because his car was waiting downstairs. When I reminded him that his finance team had locked me out of our joint accounts, he offered a cold calculation and told me I’d land somewhere because I always did.
Now, somewhere was a jolting public transit bus crawling across the Williamsburg Bridge while the city outside drowned in darkness.
A sharp, electric cramp suddenly ripped through my lower abdomen, doubling me over in my seat. I gasped, grabbing the cold metal handrail as a wave of nausea washed over me. I tried to convince myself it was just Braxton Hicks contractions—stress, exhaustion, the horrific trauma of being cast out onto the streets while carrying three fragile lives. But then a second wave hit, harder, sharper, and utterly unrelenting.
Warm liquid suddenly rushed down my legs, soaking through my maternity dress and pooling onto the rubber bus floor.
My water had broken at twenty-eight weeks.
Panic exploded through the cabin. A woman across the aisle shrieked and jumped to her feet, shouting at the driver to pull over immediately. Another passenger whipped out their phone to dial 911. The kind woman who had been sitting opposite me crawled across the aisle, grabbed my freezing hands, and tried to steady my breathing as contractions began ripping through my body every two minutes.
My phone buzzed violently in my palm. I looked down, and Ethan’s name flashed across the screen.
For one foolish, desperate microsecond, my heart leaped. I thought he had changed his mind. I thought he had realized his children were coming and turned his car around. With shaking fingers, I swiped to answer.
“Ethan,” I sobbed into the receiver, the pain tearing the breath from my lungs. “Ethan, you have to come back. I’m in an ambulance—my water broke—the babies are coming early—”
“Claire, listen to me,” Ethan’s voice cut through the static, completely flat, devoid of a single ounce of panic. “I’m boarding the flight to LAX right now. The doors are literally closing. I can’t turn this plane around over a medical scare.”
“I’m twenty-eight weeks pregnant with your triplets!” I screamed over the wail of sirens approaching in the distance. “There are doctors telling me I’m in active labor right now!”
“Claire, there are doctors for this,” he snapped, his voice dropping into cold irritation. “Don’t make things harder than they already are. Just call a hospital or something. I’ll have my lawyer look over the medical bills next week.”
The line went dead.
May you like
I stared blankly at the dark screen of my phone. The final thread tying my heart to the man I had loved for five years snapped instantly, cleanly, and permanently. I dragged my thumb across the screen, blocked his number, and deleted his contact forever.
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