Thirty minutes later, I opened the door. He was standing there with a huge pack of nappies in one hand and a paper bag of groceries in the other. He looked a little confused, as if he expected me to slam the door in his face.
Instead, I stepped aside.
‘You came… You really came,’ I whispered.
‘I said I would,’ he replied, nodding. ‘You don’t have to go through this alone.’
I wondered if he knew where Adam was.
I must have looked terrible. Two days without a shower. My T-shirt stained with milk and formula. But Greg didn’t show it.
‘Well… who’s hungry?’ he said. ‘Who wants to see Uncle Greg?’
‘Ashton,’ I replied. ‘But he just wants to be held.’
‘Then we’ll just hold him,’ he said.
And for the first time in several days, I truly breathed a sigh of relief.
Greg didn’t ask where Adam was. He didn’t judge me. He didn’t look at me with pity. He just rolled up his sleeves and started doing what needed to be done. He fed the children. He took out the rubbish. He folded the laundry that had been lying around for days.
He brought in the post and sorted through the bills without saying a word.
‘Go take a shower, Ellie,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll stay here.’
That night, he slept on the sofa. We took turns getting up to feed the babies during the night. Greg learned how to warm up a bottle while holding one of the triplets on his hip, as if he had been doing it all his life.
A week or two after he started coming regularly, I sat down next to him on the sofa while the two babies slept in the room. Ashton slept on his chest, rising and falling in time with his calm breathing.
‘You know, you don’t have to keep coming,’ I whispered.
‘I know,’ he replied with a smile.
‘I’m serious, Greg. You didn’t sign up for this.’
‘Neither did you, Ellie,’ he said, putting his hand on my knee. ‘And yet here we are.’
I didn’t expect him to stay. Every night I told myself it was temporary — that he was just acting out of guilt or duty. But he kept coming back. Again and again. He took care of the children. The flat. He cooked. He helped me feel whole again, not just a bottle-making machine.
I tried not to depend on him. I told myself that I couldn’t rely on anyone because it would hurt too much when he left. And yet I caught myself listening, waiting for the sound of the double turn of the keys in the lock.
My body relaxed as soon as I heard the door open.
One night, as I sat on the bathroom floor crying into a towel, my nerves stretched tight and my chest constricted, I heard Greg softly singing a lullaby to Amare.
The very same lullaby my mother sang to me as a child.
At that moment, my armour truly cracked. I allowed love to return.
It wasn’t sudden or dramatic. It was constant. Conscious. Greg chose us — all four of us — every day, without exception.
When the triplets turned four, he proposed to me. We said ‘I do’ in a small garden, under fairy lights, surrounded by three children who already called him ‘Dad.’
Greg never tried to erase Adam. We hardly ever talked about him. Instead, he quietly filled the void Adam left behind and rebuilt our lives from the inside out.
I went back to school. I finished my degree. I advanced my career at a small family law firm. When the time was right, we bought a small house in a quiet neighbourhood. The children grew up, each with their own personality, energy and chaos.
And then, twelve years after Adam disappeared, he reappeared.
It was a rainy Thursday. I was late for a meeting with a client and ran into a café for a quick espresso. Water was dripping from my umbrella onto the floor when I almost bumped into someone at the counter.
‘Allison?’
I froze before I even saw his face.
Adam.
He had aged. He looked tired. His coat hung loosely on him, like someone else’s clothes. But his eyes — those grey-blue eyes that had once sworn to me that he would never leave me — I would recognise them among a thousand others.
‘Adam?’ I said slowly, not sure if I was looking at a man or a ghost.
‘Since you’re here,’ he said, shifting from foot to foot, ‘I need your help.’
‘Are you kidding?’ I replied. ‘How did you know I’d be here? Have you been following me, Adam?’
‘Please listen to me. I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Ellie.’
‘Why?’ I asked coldly.
‘I need your help,’ he repeated.
‘Unbelievable,’ I sighed, stepping back. ‘You show up twelve years after you disappeared and this is where you start?’
‘I wouldn’t have come if I wasn’t desperate. It’s fate, Ellie! I didn’t think I’d see you today, but fate brought us face to face.’
The word fate brought me back to a memory I had carefully buried: the ultrasound room, the cold gel on my stomach, the flickering screen.
‘It’s triplets,’ the nurse announced at the time.
‘We’ll manage, Ellie,’ Adam said then. ‘I’m here with you. With them. Fate has given us three little miracles.’
I returned to the present as if from a dream.