Page 1 of Silver Fox's Secret Triplets
1
IVY
The cry pierced through my sleep at 2:17 in the morning. I knew before I opened my eyes that it was Elena. Her wail carried a particular pitch of distress that Sammy and Chrissy didn't possess, a sound that cut through the thin walls of our rented house and demanded immediate attention.
I rolled out of bed, my bare feet finding the cold hardwood floor. The house settled around me as I padded down the narrow hallway to the room the three of them shared. Elena stood in her crib, tears streaming down her flushed cheeks, her dark hair matted against her forehead.
"Shh, baby girl." I lifted her warm body against my chest, feeling the dampness of her pajamas. Another diaper blowout. The third one this week.
Elena's cries subsided to hiccups as I carried her to the changing table wedged between the two cribs. The streetlight filtered through the thin curtains, casting everything in pale yellow shadows. I worked by muscle memory now—stripped the soiled clothes, cleaned her up, fresh diaper, clean pajamas from the basket that never seemed to empty.
Sammy stirred in the crib beside us, his thumb sliding from his mouth. I froze, holding my breath. If he woke, Chrissy would follow, and then my night would become a symphony of demands I was too tired to conduct properly. But he settled back into sleep, his small chest rising and falling in the steady rhythm I'd learned to depend on.
Elena's eyes grew heavy as I rocked her in the old wooden chair my landlord had left behind. By the time she drifted back to sleep, the sky outside had shifted from black to deep gray. I placed her carefully in her crib and checked on the others. Chrissy had kicked off her blanket again, her small body curled into a tight ball. I covered her and brushed a strand of auburn hair from her face—hair the exact shade of mine, though her eyes were blue where mine were hazel.
All three of them had blue eyes.
After hours of attempting to sleep and being unable to, the coffee maker gurgled to life in the kitchen, and I curled up in the window seat that overlooked the harbor. Bar Harbor slept peacefully below me, the boats bobbing gently in their slips. Three years I'd watched this view change, three years of building a life from nothing, of proving to myself that I could do this alone, though it wasn’t truly alone.
My father still insisted on sending me a thousand dollars a month for "expenses", which he had no clue was being spent on legitimate needs. He probably assumed I went shopping like other twenty-somethings of affluent businessmen and bought shoes and purses like they were trendy.
When my phone rang, I stared at the screen, my father's name displayed in stark letters. He never called this early. He never called at all unless it was the monthly check-in that felt more obligatory than affectionate.
"Dad?"
"Ivy." His voice sounded older than I remembered, strained. "I need you to come home."
The words hit me before I could prepare for them. Home. As if Boston had ever felt that way to me.
"What's wrong?"
"It's your mother." He cleared his throat, and I heard the careful control he used in business meetings. "She's been in and out of the hospital. They found a mass. It's…" He paused, and in that silence, I understood everything—especially the early call. My heart sank and fear wrapped around me like a cold, wet blanket.
"How bad?"
"Stage three. Maybe four. The doctors want to start treatment immediately, but she's asking for you."
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool glass. Three floors below, a fishing boat chugged out toward the open water, its engine cutting through the morning quiet, distracting me long enough to make him pause.
"Ivy? Are you there?"
"I'm here." My voice sounded steadier than I felt. "I'll drive down today."
"Good. That's… good. I'll have your room ready."
My room. The bedroom I hadn't seen since the night I left, pregnant and terrified and convinced I had no other choice.
After he hung up, I sat in the growing daylight and tried to figure out how to pack three years of secrets into a minivan. The triplets would wake soon, demanding breakfast and attention and the thousand small things that filled our days. I needed to call Chelsea, my friend who watched them when I worked my part-time shifts at the marina gift shop. I needed to figure out how to explain to three-year-olds why we were leaving the only home they'd ever known.
I needed to figure out how to walk back into a world I'd run from.
The drive south took five hours with stops for diaper changes and snacks and the inevitable meltdown when Chrissy dropped her favorite stuffed elephant and couldn't reach it from her car seat. I pulled over at a rest stop near Portsmouth and sat in the parking lot while they napped, and I let a few tears escape.
Fear crawled up my throat as the city skyline appeared ahead of us. Boston rose from the horizon in familiar spires of glass and steel, and with it came the memories I'd spent three years trying to bury. Duncan's hands on my skin. The weight of his body. The way he'd whispered my name in the darkness of his apartment while rain drummed against the windows.
The way I'd run from him the next morning and never looked back.
My father's office building stood near the center of downtown, forty-two floors of success and ambition. I wondered if Duncan still worked nearby, if his corner office still overlooked the harbor, if he still stayed late into the evening because work was easier than going home to an empty apartment.
