Until I climbed the stairs that night.
At first, I thought someone had left bags outside my door.
Then one of them moved.
I stopped halfway down the hallway.
There were three infant carriers lined up against the wall.
Three.
A pink diaper bag had been wedged between them.
On top of it sat an envelope with my name written across the front.
MASON.
I recognized the handwriting immediately.
My older brother, Eric.
My stomach turned.
“Eric?”
I looked down the hallway.
Nothing.
I rushed toward the carriers.
Inside were his six-month-old triplet daughters.
Lily.
Brooke.
And Sophie.
Their mother, Melissa, had died thirteen days earlier from complications following a sudden infection.
The funeral had barely ended.
Eric had looked destroyed during the service.
I remembered standing beside him near the cemetery parking lot while he stared at the ground.
“I don’t know how to do this without her,” he had whispered.
I had put my hand on his shoulder.
“You don’t have to know tonight.”
Apparently, thirteen days had been enough for him to decide.
My hands were already shaking when I opened the envelope.
There was only one sheet of paper.
Mason,
I’m sorry.
I can’t raise them by myself.
Melissa was the one who knew what she was doing. I don’t.
You’re better than me.
Please make sure they’re okay.
Eric.
That was all.
No phone number.
No explanation.
No promise that he was coming back.
I read it again.
Then again.
As though another paragraph might magically appear if I stared long enough.
One of the babies began to fuss.
Sophie.
The smallest of the three.
I only knew because Melissa had once laughed and told me Sophie was “the tiny boss.”
I crouched beside her carrier.
“Hey.”
Her face scrunched.
“Don’t do that.”
She started crying.
“Oh, come on. I just got here.”
Her sisters joined her.
Within seconds, the hallway was filled with three screaming babies and one grown man having the first panic attack of his life.
My downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Coleman, opened her door.
She was nearly seventy and had appointed herself unofficial manager of every person’s business in the building.
“Mason?”
She came upstairs.
Then she saw the carriers.
Her eyes widened.
“Good Lord.”
“They’re Eric’s.”
“I know whose babies they are. Where is he?”
I handed her the note.
She read it once.
Her mouth tightened.
“That coward.”
I didn’t answer.
Because at that moment, I was too angry to defend him and too devastated to agree with her.
Mrs. Coleman looked at me.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mason, you’ve never even babysat one baby.”
“I know.”
“There are three.”
“I can count, Mrs. Coleman.”
She ignored that.
“You work twelve-hour shifts.”
“I know.”
“You have one bedroom.”
“I know.”
“You live on frozen burritos.”
I turned eighteen on a Tuesday. No cake. No card. Not even a half-hearted “happy birthday.” Just my father sitting at the kitchen table, his wife stirring sugar into her mug, and my stepbrother leaning back in his chair with that look people get when they already know how the story ends.
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