Elena agreed to give Alex twenty minutes at a quiet coffee shop near her office.
“When the second ultrasound revealed it was quadruplets, I panicked and tried to find you again,” she told him, her hands wrapped around a paper cup. “Then they were born premature at thirty-two weeks. I was caught in a nightmare between the NICU, medical bills, four incubators, and running an emerging business. I stopped calling because every closed door told me the same thing: you didn’t care.”
“My mother intercepted every single attempt,” Alex said, his face pale.
“That explains why you never answered,” Elena replied softly. “It doesn’t explain why you walked out on me in the first place.”
Before leaving, Elena took out her phone and showed him a single photograph from six years earlier: four tiny infants connected to monitors inside the neonatal intensive care unit.
“You lost years, Alex,” she said quietly. “I survived them alone.”
