The light filtering through the floor to ceiling windows in our Mahatta house was not warm or welcoming, only a thin, unforgiving brightness that revealed every drifting dust mote and exhausted shadow on my face.
I hardly recognized the woman in the mirror, a hollowed, worn version of myself, like a stranger who had stepped into my life and borrowed my skin without asking permission.
My name is Appa Vape, twenty eight years old, though my body and bones felt decades older, as if time had doubled its weight on me overnight.
Six weeks earlier, I had delivered triplets by emergency cesarean: three beautiful, heartbreakingly fragile baby boys named Leo, Sam, and Noah, each one a miracle and a new demand.
My body felt foreign, reorganized by motherhood into shapes I barely understood, softer where it had once been firm, stretched and mapped by silver lines tracing the road toward these children.
The incision across my abdomen ached constantly, a reminder that a surgeon’s quick decisions had saved four lives that night: my three sons and the woman I was still struggling to become.
Sleep deprivation pressed on me like a fog so dense the room tilted and skipped if I turned my head too quickly or tried to stand without bracing myself first.
I lived in a state of barely controlled calm, navigating the impossible logistics of caring for three newborns at once, constantly juggling overlapping feeding schedules, diapers, bottles, and relentless, echoing cries.
Nannies and night nurses paraded through our house, quitting every few weeks, burned out by the sheer intensity of three infants, insisting even professionals had limits they refused to cross.
Our four thousand square foot luxury home felt suffocatingly small, every corner jammed with bassinets, formula, wipes, pumps, monitors, and three different versions of everything a baby could possibly need.
There I was that morning, in milk stained pajamas, hair knotted into a messy bun, dark circles carved under my eyes, rocking one wailing baby while bouncing the other two in bouncers.
That was the exact moment my husband Mark chose to deliver his final, devastating verdict on our marriage, as if timing his cruelty to my most vulnerable, exhausted state.
He strode into our bedroom wearing a freshly pressed charcoal Tom Ford suit that probably cost more than most people’s monthly salary, smelling of expensive cologne and sharper, colder things.
He never glanced at the stroller holding our three sleeping sons, never asked how I felt, never offered help; he simply looked at me like I was an unpleasant accounting error.
His gaze moved slowly, clinically, from my unwashed hair to the dark bruises under my eyes, to the postpartum compression garment visible beneath my pajama top, to the extra weight I still carried.
Without ceremony, he dropped a thick cardboard folder onto our pristine duvet, the sound sharp and final, like a gavel striking wood in a courtroom announcing someone else’s fate.
I did not need to open it; the words “PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE” were printed clearly on the tab, announcing the end of our seven year marriage in cold capitals.
Mark did not bother with polite excuses or lawyer crafted phrases about irreconcilable differences; instead, he gave me the purest, ugliest version of his reasoning, dressed entirely in aesthetics and contempt.
He looked me up and down slowly, deliberately, letting his eyes linger on every perceived imperfection as if building a case against me from my own exhausted, changing body.
“Look at you, Appa,” he said, voice thick with disgust.
“You look like a scarecrow.
Unkempt, sloppy, completely abandoned.
You’ve become repulsive to me and you’re ruining my image.”
“A CEO at my level,” he continued smoothly, adjusting his platinum cufflinks, “a man building a multibillion dollar company under constant public scrutiny, needs a wife who reflects success, vitality, power, sophistication, not this deterioration.”
I blinked slowly, too drained to summon anger, my voice rasping from sleepless nights as I whispered, “Mark, I gave birth to three of your children six weeks ago.
Your sons.
Your heirs.”
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