Instead, I stepped back to let him in.
‘You’re here… You’re really here,’ I said.
‘I meant it,’ he said, nodding. ‘You don’t have to do this alone.’
I wondered if he knew where Adam was.
I must have looked pretty rough. I hadn’t had a shower for two days. My shirt was caked in colostrum. But Greg didn’t even react to any of it.
“Who’s hungry?” he asked, stepping inside. “Who wants to go to Uncle Greg?”
“Ashton,” I replied. “But he just wanted to be held.”
“Right then,” said Greg, setting down the bags and walking over to the bassinet.
And for the first time in days, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Greg didn’t ask where Adam was. He didn’t press me or pity me. He simply rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He fed the babies, took the rubbish out and folded the laundry that had been sitting in the basket for days.
He even brought my post in and sorted the bills without saying a word.
“Go and have a shower, Alli,” he said. “I’m here.”
He slept on the sofa that night and we took turns feeding the babies during the night. Greg learnt how to warm up bottles whilst balancing a triplet on his hip, as if he’d been doing it all his life.
One night, perhaps a week or two after he’d started dropping by regularly, I sat next to him on the sofa whilst two of the babies slept in the bedroom. Ashton seemed to love Greg, and my son would only really fall asleep when he was lying on Greg’s chest.
“You don’t have to turn up like this all the time,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said, smiling at me.
“I mean it, Greg,” I said. “That’s not what you signed up for.”
“Neither did you, Alli,” he said, squeezing my knee. “But here we are.”
I hadn’t expected him to stay. Every evening I told myself it was only temporary, that he was only here out of guilt or a sense of duty. But he kept coming back. He looked after the babies, he looked after the flat, he cooked, and he made me feel like a human being.
I tried not to rely on him. I told myself I shouldn’t rely on anyone, that it would hurt even more if he left. But I caught myself listening for the spare key in the lock.
And soon I noticed how my body relaxed when he came in.
And one night, as I sat on the bathroom floor crying into a towel, my nerves on edge and my chest tightening with panic, I heard Greg softly humming to Amara.
It was the same lullaby my mother had always sung to me.
That was the moment I let my guard down. That was the moment I let love in again.
It wasn’t flashy or immediate. It was steady, real and full of choices made with intention. Greg chose us – all four of us – every single day.
When my triplets turned four, he proposed to me. We got married in a small ceremony in the back garden, lit by fairy lights and warmed by the laughter of three children who already called him ‘Dad’.
Greg never tried to erase Adam, but we didn’t really talk about him much either. Instead, he simply filled the void Adam had left behind and rebuilt our lives from the ground up.
I went back to school, graduated and worked my way up in a small family law firm. When the time was right, we bought a modest house in a quiet neighbourhood. The children thrived, each in their own brilliant, chaotic way.
And then, 12 years after the day Adam disappeared, he came back.
It was a rainy Thursday afternoon, and I was running late for a client meeting. I popped into a café to grab an espresso to warm me up and nearly bumped into someone standing at the counter.
My umbrella was dripping water onto the floor as I looked up, already half-apologising.
“Allison?”
That voice made everything inside me freeze. I knew it was him before I even looked at his face.
Adam.
He was older, haggard and unshaven. His coat hung awkwardly on him, as if he’d borrowed it from someone else. But his eyes—those same grey-blue eyes that had once sworn to me he’d never leave me, and the three babies growing inside me—were unmistakable.
For a second, I couldn’t move. My breath caught in my chest.
“Adam?” I said slowly, unsure whether I was speaking to a man or a ghost.
“Now that you’re here,” he said, shifting his weight and looking around, “I need your help.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” I said, my pulse racing. “How did you know I’d be here? Are you following me, Adam?”
“Just listen to me. Please! I’ve been trying to find you, Alli.”
“Why?” I asked. My skin prickled.
“I need your help,” he repeated. ‘I didn’t know who else to turn to.’
‘Unbelievable,’ I said, taking a step back.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘just listen to me. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t desperate. It’s fate, Alli! I never thought I’d see you here today, but fate has brought us together again.’
And then it hit me – hard. A memory I’d buried deep beneath years of exhaustion and survival. The ultrasound scan. The cold gel on my stomach. A grainy, beautiful chaos flickered across the screen.