Two years had passed since Anne died, yet the house they once dreamed of crowding with children still echoed with absence, the walls unchanged, the silence thick enough to feel physical, until even the ticking clock at the kitchen table sounded like it was mocking him for staying.

Friends urged him to move on, to remarry, to start over.

But Richard didn’t want to start over.

He wanted to keep a promise—one Anne had whispered from a hospital bed, her voice thin but certain, asking him not to let love die with her, asking him to give it somewhere to go.

That promise followed him one rain-heavy evening to St. Mary’s Orphanage on the edge of the city, a place he never intended to visit, stopping only because his truck broke down nearby and he needed a phone.

Inside, the air smelled of disinfectant and old paint, and as he waited, the sound of crying pulled him down a narrow hallway he hadn’t meant to enter, until he reached a small room crowded with cribs pressed close together.

Inside them lay nine baby girls.

All dark-skinned.
All impossibly small.
All reaching out with fragile arms, not crying together, but in a broken, uneven chorus that felt less like noise and more like pleading.

A young nurse noticed his stare and spoke quietly, explaining that they had been left together in the night, wrapped in the same blanket, no note, no names, just nine lives abandoned at once.

“No one wants them,” she added softly. “People offer to take one… maybe two. Never all. They’ll be separated.”

Separated.

The word struck him harder than grief ever had.