Five days after I brought our three newborn daughters home from the hospital, my husband rolled a black suitcase across the kitchen floor while I was warming three bottles.
I thought he was putting it away.
Then I noticed his passport sticking out of the front pocket.
“Where are you going?”
Eric—my husband of four years and the father of three babies who were less than a week old—set his phone on the counter.
“Cabo.”
I stared at him.
Behind me, one bottle warmer beeped. Ava started crying in the bassinet beside the kitchen table.
Eric zipped the suitcase.
“I need to reset.”
The Suitcase in My Kitchen
My name is Rachel Bennett.
At the time, I was thirty-two, living outside Raleigh, North Carolina, and sleeping in stretches so short I had stopped calling them sleep.
Our daughters, Ava, Mia, and Zoe, had been born at thirty-six weeks.
Three babies.
Three bassinets.
Three car seats.
Three sets of bottles lined up beside the sink.
Before they were born, Eric loved telling people he was going to be a triplet dad.
At our twelve-week ultrasound, when the technician pointed to three separate heartbeats, he actually cried.
“Three?”
The technician smiled.
“Three.”
Eric squeezed my hand.
“I’m going to be the best dad in the world.”
For the rest of my pregnancy, that became his favorite sentence.
He bought three matching pink onesies before we knew whether the babies were girls. He sent ultrasound pictures to people I barely knew. He joked about needing a bigger SUV.
He liked telling people he had always wanted a loud house.
But when three cribs arrived in boxes, my younger sister, Hannah, helped me assemble them.
Eric had fantasy football that night.
When I bought a book about caring for multiples, he left it untouched on the coffee table.
“You’ll tell me the important stuff.”
At the time, I laughed.
I stopped laughing during labor.
I had been contracting for hours when Eric leaned toward me in the hospital room and whispered:
“Can you try to breathe quieter?”
I turned my head.
“What?”
He glanced toward the nurses.
“I’m already stressed. The noises are making it worse.”
A nurse standing near my IV looked at him for several seconds.
Then she adjusted my blanket without saying anything.
I remembered her face later.
Five days after we came home, Eric stood in our kitchen with that suitcase.
“You’re leaving?”
“Not leaving leaving.”
He picked up his phone.
“It’s two weeks.”
Ava was crying harder.
I lifted her from the bassinet with one arm while checking the bottle temperature with the other.
“Two weeks?”
“The guys already booked everything.”
I looked at him.
That sentence mattered.
Already booked.
“When did you book it?”
His eyes dropped to his phone.
“That’s not the point.”
“Eric, when did you book Cabo?”
He exhaled.
“Rachel, I’m struggling.”
He said the crying was getting to him.
The lack of sleep.
The pressure.
His mental health.
He said he could feel himself becoming overwhelmed and needed to get away before he became useless to everybody.
I shifted Ava against my shoulder.
“I haven’t slept more than ninety minutes at a time since Tuesday.”
“Exactly. We’re both exhausted.”
“Then why am I the one staying?”
He didn’t answer.
Mia began crying upstairs.
A few seconds later, Zoe joined her.
Eric closed his eyes.
That small reaction told me more than anything he said next.
“See? This is what I mean.”
I stared at him.
“They’re your daughters.”
“I know that.”
“They’re five days old.”
“Rachel, I’m not abandoning anybody.”
He reached for the suitcase handle.
I moved between him and the kitchen doorway.
“Please don’t go.”
He looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed.
“Hannah can help.”
“Hannah has a job.”
“Your mom could come.”
“My mom lives four hours away.”
He rubbed his forehead.
“You’re strong. You’ve got this.”
Then he walked around me.
I stood in the kitchen holding Ava while Mia and Zoe cried upstairs and listened to the wheels of his suitcase roll across the hardwood floor.
The front door opened.
Then closed.
At Two in the Morning
The first night, I told myself I could manage.
By midnight, I had stopped believing it.
At 1:40 a.m., Zoe needed changing.
At 1:52, Ava woke hungry.
At 2:03, Mia started crying while I was feeding Ava.
I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against a cabinet.
Three bottles were lined up beside my leg.
Ava was against my chest.
Mia was crying in a portable bassinet.
Zoe started again from the living room.
I cried with them.
At 2:11, I called Hannah.
She answered on the second ring.
“Rachel?”
I couldn’t get the sentence out.
She heard the babies.
“Where’s Eric?”
“Cabo.”
There was silence.
“What?”
“He went to Cabo.”
Twenty-eight minutes later, headlights came through my front windows.
Hannah walked in wearing sweatpants, an old NC State sweatshirt, and two different socks.
She didn’t hug me.
She took Ava from my arms.
“Go wash your face.”
By sunrise, she had written A, M, and Z on strips of blue painter’s tape and stuck them to bottles.
She made a feeding chart and taped it to the refrigerator.
She set alarms on both our phones.
She put diapers in baskets downstairs so I wouldn’t have to keep climbing the stairs.
Before leaving for work, she pointed at me.
“Call me before you get desperate next time.”
“I can’t keep calling you.”
“Yes, you can.”
Eric didn’t call that day.
Or the next.
