I used to think the hardest part of raising twins was the exhaustion. The kind that turns time into a blur of bottles, diapers, and three-hour stretches of sleep if you’re lucky. But I was wrong. No family. No grandparents. No aunt who could swing by with soup and tell me to go shower. My parents were gone, and I’d been their only child. Mark had grown up in foster care, bouncing between homes like a piece of luggage nobody wanted to claim. We built our life on our own—proud of it, even—but when the twins arrived, that pride started to feel like a weight.
Two weeks before everything unraveled, I broke down on the kitchen floor with one baby screaming in my arms and the other banging a spoon like he was trying to summon help through noise.
