Chapter 8 - Two Birthdays
Marcus pleaded guilty eleven months after Felix was born. The charges included corporate theft, identity fraud, and falsifying financial records. His sworn lie about staying in Chicago became part of the case against him. The stolen money was recovered from the trust before Bianca could spend it.
She cooperated with investigators and admitted helping Marcus build his false alibi. In exchange, she avoided prison but lost her job and surrendered every financial benefit he'd promised her. Three months after Felix's birth, Bianca had a daughter of her own.
I never blamed that child. Children don't choose the lies surrounding their arrival.
The court invalidated Marcus's attempt to use the adultery clause. I kept my shares, my house, and control of the company my father built. Our board removed him unanimously. His name disappeared from the executive floor before mine returned to the office door.
Louise came to see me after the sentencing, standing on my porch with two wrapped gifts.
"I should have believed you," she said.
"You should have asked questions before calling me unfaithful."
"I was protecting my son."
"No. You were helping him punish his wife."
She lowered her eyes. I let her leave the gifts, but I didn't invite her inside that day. Forgiveness, I learned, didn't require immediate access to the people someone had wounded.
Ivy came home from the NICU first. Felix followed twelve days later. They were different in nearly every way — Ivy loud, impatient, determined to be held; Felix quiet, watching every face like he was trying to understand it. Doctors kept studying my pregnancy, because no one at the hospital had previously seen two babies conceived weeks apart develop in separate uteruses and arrive more than a month apart. Some called them twins. Others called them siblings who'd shared part of a pregnancy.
I simply called them mine.
On Ivy's first birthday, I set a tiny cake in front of her. Felix sat beside her, still five weeks from turning one by his own birthday. Ivy reached into the frosting and pressed her hand against his cheek. He laughed.
For their first year, Marcus could contact them only through arrangements approved by the court. I never promised to hide the truth from them, but I refused to make their father's crimes the center of their childhood. Someday they'd ask why their birth certificates carried different dates. I'd tell them the medical truth first — that I'd been born with two uteruses without knowing it, that Ivy began growing in one and six weeks later Felix began growing in the other, that one child arrived early while the second stayed inside me for thirty-eight more days.
When they were old enough, I'd tell them the rest. That their father had looked at two beating hearts and seen an opportunity. That he'd calculated weeks before asking whether they were healthy. That he'd accused their mother before admitting where he'd been. That he'd demanded proof of their blood while stealing the future my father had left them.
Marcus spent months trying to prove one of my babies wasn't his. In the end, science proved both belonged to him.
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But love proved something else. Being a father was never about sharing their DNA. It was about what he chose to do after learning they existed.
And Marcus had made his choice in the ultrasound room — when he removed his wedding ring, walked away from two heartbeats, and turned one of his own children into a lie.
