My husband tried to divide our newborn twins before I had even recovered enough to sit upright.
He stood beside my hospital bed, holding a divorce agreement in one hand and an expensive pen in the other, and told me he intended to take our son.
“You can keep Rose,” Dylan said.
“I’ll raise Eli with my parents.
It’s the sensible arrangement.”
For several seconds, I simply stared at him.
Rose was sleeping in the bassinet nearest my bed.
Eli had only recently been brought back from additional observation because his breathing had needed assistance after our emergency delivery.
Their hospital bracelets were still too large for their tiny wrists.
And their father was talking about separating them as casually as someone dividing furniture between two apartments.
My name is Anna Mercer, although for the first twenty-eight years of my life, I was Anna Reed.
I had been married to Dylan Mercer for five years.
Until that morning, I believed our marriage was strained but salvageable.
We lived outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where winter turned the bare fields silver and the old farmhouses seemed to disappear beneath low gray clouds.
Our twins arrived six weeks early, after a pregnancy complicated by high blood pressure and an emergency C-section that left me weak and frightened.
At thirty-three, I had never felt so physically vulnerable.
Dylan apparently considered that the perfect moment to begin negotiating our divorce.
He had missed most of the delivery because he was attending a charity celebration hosted by Sabrina Vale, a woman whose name had become painfully familiar in our household.
Sabrina was thirty-six, beautiful in the polished way that made photographers search for her in every crowded room.
She owned an event-planning business and had built a local reputation through elaborate charity dinners, historical preservation campaigns, and carefully publicized acts of generosity.
For six months, she had presented herself as the savior of the Mercer family.
Dylan’s parents, Thomas and Elaine Mercer, lived in a sprawling old farmhouse on Orchard Road.
It had belonged to Thomas’s grandparents, and for years, it served as the center of every family holiday.
Its stone walls were covered in climbing roses.
The kitchen had uneven wooden floors and a brick fireplace that smoked whenever the wind blew from the north.
Dylan loved that house more than any place on earth.
When his father developed serious health problems and their savings began disappearing into medical bills, the mortgage fell behind.
A series of unsuccessful refinancing attempts followed, and eventually the bank foreclosed.
I still remember the evening Dylan told me.
He sat at our kitchen table with his face buried in his hands.
“Dad’s going to lose the only thing his family ever managed to keep,” he said.
I sat beside him and promised we would find a way to help.
He never asked how.
At the time, I had recently received the proceeds from selling my late grandfather’s small printing business.
He had taught me how to operate an old letterpress when I was eleven, and he had left me the business before my marriage.
I kept those proceeds separate because they were the last substantial thing he had entrusted to me.
When I learned that the bank had taken possession of the Mercer farmhouse, I contacted attorney Nina Patel, who
