“Maisie.”
The baby continued holding my finger.
She did not know that I had no savings.
She did not know that her father had disappeared.
She did not know that I had never planned to become responsible for anyone except myself.
She only knew that someone was beside her.
Mrs. Fenwick rested a hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll call family services in the morning. There are couples waiting for children. People with nurseries, proper jobs, and experience.”
I opened my mouth to agree.
That was the sensible answer.
The girls deserved more than a cramped apartment above a shop.
They deserved two prepared parents, three proper cribs, and a bank account that did not frighten its owner.
“Okay,” I whispered.
But I was looking at Maisie.
Her fingers tightened.
“Okay,” I said again. “I’ve got you.”
Mrs. Fenwick became very still.
“You mean until morning?”
I looked at the three car seats.
“No.”
“Reid.”
“I can’t let strangers take them tonight.”
“Tonight is how it starts.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she picked up the diaper bag.
“Fine. I’ll make bottles while you carry them inside.”
I brought the girls into my apartment one at a time.
Somewhere between the second trip and the third, I stopped thinking of them as Callan’s children.
I was still Uncle Reid.
But I had already begun becoming something else.
Mrs. Fenwick taught me how to warm a bottle.
She taught me to test the milk against my wrist and to support a baby’s head.
She changed the first diaper while I watched with the concentration of a man defusing an explosive.
The girls were named Liora, Carys, and Maisie.
Liora was the oldest by eleven minutes.
Carys arrived next.
Maisie was last and smallest.
At three in the morning, all three began crying at once.
Mrs. Fenwick stood in the middle of my apartment with one baby against her shoulder.
I held the other two badly.
“This is impossible,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I cannot do this.”
“Probably not.”
I stared at her.
“That isn’t helpful.”
“You don’t need reassurance. You need another bottle.”
By sunrise, my apartment looked as though a storm had passed through it.
Blankets covered the floor.
Three bottles stood beside the sink.
I had formula on my shirt.
Maisie was asleep against my chest.
Family services arrived that afternoon.
A caseworker named Marla Dane explained that Callan had abandoned his children and would be reported missing.
Temporary placement could be arranged immediately.
The triplets might be placed together if a suitable home could be found, but there were no guarantees.
“Together?” I asked.
“We would try.”
“Try?”
“Three infants are difficult to place.”
Liora began crying from Mrs. Fenwick’s arms.
Carys answered from the borrowed basket we had turned into a temporary bed.
Maisie woke against me.
All three cries filled the apartment.
The caseworker waited.
“What would I have to do to keep them here?”
Mrs. Fenwick looked at me sharply.
Marla studied my face.
“Temporarily?”
“For as long as they need.”
“You understand that this is not babysitting.”
“Yes.”
“You will need a larger place, background checks, home inspections, childcare arrangements, legal hearings—”
“What forms do I sign?”
Mrs. Fenwick closed her eyes.
Later, she told me that was the moment she realized arguing would be useless.
The next several months were a blur.
Finch & Nail Hardware belonged to an elderly man named Emmett Crow.
When I explained what had happened, he stared at me over his glasses.
“You intend to raise three babies above my shop?”
“I intend to try.”
“That ceiling is thin.”
“I know.”
He grumbled for several minutes.
Then he handed me the keys to the empty storage room behind my apartment.
“You can knock through the wall.”
“I can’t afford the rent.”
“I didn’t mention rent.”
Emmett never admitted that he had become attached to the girls.
He simply began leaving boxes of diapers near the stairs.
Mrs. Fenwick watched them while I worked.
At night, I repaired locks and sharpened tools for extra money.
The girls slept in three mismatched cribs donated by customers.
For their first birthday, I stayed awake after midnight writing in a notebook.
I had started it because I was afraid I would forget things.
The first time Liora stood.
The way Carys sneezed whenever she laughed too hard.
The way Maisie refused to sleep unless she could hear one of her sisters breathing nearby.
That night, I wrote:
To my three girls,
You are one year old today. I don’t know if you will ever read this. I don’t know if I am doing any of this correctly. I only know I am not going anywhere.
Then I closed the notebook and pushed it into the back of a kitchen drawer.
Twenty-two years passed the way a long shift does.
Slowly while you are living it.
All at once when you look back.
I packed school lunches using the wrong bread.
I burned pancakes and called them crispy.
I braided hair so badly that Mrs. Fenwick waited on the porch each morning with a brush.
“You are giving these children emotional damage,” she said once while undoing the knot I had created in Carys’s hair.
“I watched a tutorial.”
“You watched the wrong tutorial.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know. That is what worries me.”
I worked double shifts.
Sometimes triple shifts when one of the girls needed braces, new glasses, a school trip, or shoes because all three had somehow outgrown theirs in the same week.
