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.
There were fevers.
Science fairs.
Dance recitals.
Parent meetings.
Three separate heartbreaks during which I had no useful advice, so I made grilled cheese and sat nearby while they cried.
There were also years when all three seemed to dislike me at once.
Maisie was thirteen when she began slamming doors.
Carys was fifteen when she refused to speak to me for nearly a month because I would not let her attend an overnight party.
Liora was seventeen when she shouted:
“You don’t understand anything about us!”
She was right.
I did not understand everything.
But I stayed.
That was the one thing I knew how to do.
I missed things too.
A cousin’s wedding in the fictional city of Evermere because Carys developed the flu.
A fishing trip I had promised myself for ten years.
Promotions that required relocating away from Bramblewick.
And Seraphine.
Seraphine was the woman I loved.
She worked at the bakery across from Finch & Nail Hardware.
We met when the girls were seven.
For six years, she joined us for dinners, birthdays, and school plays.
She loved the triplets, but she also wanted a life that belonged partly to her.
One evening, she stood at my front door holding the sweater she had worn during dinner.
“I’m not asking you to choose between me and the girls,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’m asking whether there is room for me here.”
