The morning light slicing through the floor-to-ceiling windows of our Manhattan penthouse wasn’t a greeting; it was a deposition. It arrived cold and clinical, a sterile spotlight that seemed designed to expose the microscopic dust dancing in the air and the profound, bone-deep exhaustion etched into my skin.
I was forty-two days postpartum. My body felt like a borrowed house, a structure that had been hollowed out and hadn’t quite settled back onto its foundation. My C-section incision throbbed with every shallow breath, a jagged reminder of the three lives I had just ushered into the world. In this fog of sleep deprivation, time had ceased to be a linear progression. It was now a frantic pile of alarms, sterile bottles, and the rhythmic, demanding cries of three newborns. On the monitor, I heard one of them—Leo—stir, followed by Maya and Caleb, a trio of dominoes tipped over by the sudden realization of hunger.
I am Anna Vane. At twenty-eight, I looked at my reflection in the darkened screen of the nursery monitor and saw a woman who looked a century old. This was the exact moment my husband chose to turn my life into a corporate press release.
