Chapter 3

An aftershock was predicted for the area.

The rescue team ordered everyone to evacuate.

I refused to leave. My son was still missing.

Elara, lost in her own grief, still tried to comfort me.

"You have to live, so you can find him. The rescue team will use their equipment. They'll find him faster than you can with your bare hands."

"I know you're scared. But as long as you're alive, there's still hope."

She dragged me onto a bus leaving the earthquake zone.

The land was filled with the sounds of weeping.

Desperate parents, grieving children, frantic husbands, and determined wives.

Everyone here held their loved ones so dear.

How could Kaelen and Jasper, two fathers, be so heartless?

Tears streamed down my face, a lump of grief lodged in my throat.

The bus was silent for a long time. Then, Elara's hoarse voice broke the quiet.

"Aurora, I don't want to be with Kaelen anymore. When we get back, I'm divorcing him."

She was clutching her daughter's body, her face a mask of agony.

"I'm divorcing him too," she whispered. "Jasper doesn't deserve to be her father."

I remembered the night before we left for this trip. The six of us, taking a walk together, laughing.

How could everything fall apart in one night?

We cried until we couldn't see straight. The staff at the morgue kindly offered to notify the children's fathers.

But both of their phones were off.

They were so consumed with Cora Croft that they had forgotten they even had families.

We watched as Talia's small, perfect body was reduced to a box of ashes.

Elara couldn't hold it in any longer. She collapsed into my arms, sobbing.

"She was so big... how can she be so small now?"

"I carried her for nine months... I raised her... how can she just be gone?"

By the time she had cried herself to the point of collapse and I had taken her home, the Kane brothers still hadn't shown up.

I looked around the home I had lived in for five years. Everywhere, there were traces of our children.

I hung their black-and-white photos on the wall, and placed two urns in front of them.

But Carter's was empty. They never found his body.

A week later, on the day we were to bury them, their fathers finally came home.

The moment they walked in, they saw the photos and the urns.

Kaelen stormed into the bedroom, his voice full of rage.

"Aurora, what the hell is this? How can you joke about something like this?"

Tears started to fall again. "I'm not joking. Talia is gone."

"You have two photos up, two urns. If you're going to play a prank, at least be thorough." He stood with his hands on his hips, sneering at me.

"It's because they never found Carter's body. The rescue team told me all they found was his shoe. The wall crushed him."

I stood up and met his gaze. "Are you satisfied now? Do you believe me now?"

From behind Kaelen, a head popped out.

Cora Croft, her eyes wide with fake innocence. "Kaelen, what kind of new game are your wives playing?"

Kaelen just waved a dismissive hand at her. "It's nothing. They're just being dramatic."

But as he said it, he hesitated.

"You can't just joke about your own children's lives."