One day he simply never came home.
One evening, his mother called Cade into her bedroom.
Her voice was gentle but tired.
“Cade… he’s not coming back.”
Cade waited for anger to rise inside him. Or grief. Or something loud enough to match the moment.
But instead he felt… empty.
The triplets arrived early.
They were so small they looked unreal, lying inside incubators in the NICU. Wires everywhere. Machines breathing for them.
Their mother stood beside those incubators for hours every day.
Watching them.
Memorizing them.
Their father never visited the hospital.
He never called.
Never asked how they were doing.
A year later, Cade buried his mother.
The funeral was quiet. Smaller than it should have been.
Cade kept glancing at the back doors of the chapel, half expecting his father to appear at the last moment.
He never did.
That same week, social services came to the house.
“You’re not obligated to take care of them,” one of the workers told him carefully.
“You’re only eighteen. You still have your whole life ahead of you.”
Cade looked past them into the spare bedroom.
Three cribs stood in a row.
Three sleeping babies.
“But I can,” he said.
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