After Four Daughters, My Husband Finally Got the Son He’d Been Begging For – But When He Held Our Newborn Boy for the First Time, His Words Made My Stomach Drop
Part Three: Paulina’s House
Paulina pulled the front door shut behind me and took the car seat straight out of my arms without saying a single word first. My son was three days old by then, and I was standing in my own sister’s front hallway holding a diaper bag, a hospital bracelet still fastened around my wrist, and a phone absolutely full of messages Grayson refused to even open.
The girls were already upstairs somewhere in the house. Harper had asked twice already exactly when Dad was coming to pick them up. Both times, I genuinely hadn’t known what to tell her.
“Sit down,” Paulina ordered, already steering me firmly toward the couch. “You look like you’re about to fall straight over onto the floor.”
Sadie had packed up the banner the girls made and brought it along in the car. It sat folded now on the staircase, one corner bent, WELCOME HOME OLIVER spelled out across it in four wildly different marker colors.
“Should I save it for when Dad comes to get us?” she’d asked earlier, and I’d told her yes, mostly because I genuinely couldn’t make myself explain, out loud, why we weren’t actually going home at all — not that week, and maybe not for considerably longer than that.
“He won’t pick up,” I told Paulina, holding my phone out toward her. “Look at this.”
Three missed calls sitting there from me, entirely unanswered. One single reply from Grayson, finally, cold and clipped down to the bone: I’ll have my lawyer contact you about the separation.
Paulina read it twice through, her expression darkening further with each pass.
“Teresa. Stop calling him,” she said, firm.
“He’s my husband, Paulina. I have to make him actually listen to reason.”
“He’s not listening. That’s the entire point of all this.” She sat down directly across from me and put one hand firmly on my knee. “Every time you call, every time you beg, it just makes you look guiltier in his head. You are not guilty of anything. Start acting like it.”
I looked down at my son, fast asleep against my chest, entirely oblivious to any of it.
“So what exactly am I supposed to do instead?”
“You prove it,” she said, “in a language he genuinely can’t argue his way around afterward.”
I ordered the paternity test that same afternoon, before I’d even really thought it through. Paulina drove back to the house and returned with Grayson’s own toothbrush, taken from our bathroom without asking his permission first. The cheek swab from my son took all of ten seconds total. Mailing both samples off took nearly a full hour, mostly because I sat parked outside the pharmacy with the sealed envelope resting on my lap, hands shaking too badly to actually carry it inside.
Waiting, as it turned out, was easily the worst part of the entire ordeal.
The days blurred together in a way that felt almost cruel — feeding my son every three hours around the clock while my own body still ached from surgery, listening to Paulina field phone calls from relatives who’d already heard some garbled version of events, watching my daughters draw pictures for a father who wasn’t answering any of our calls. Harper stopped asking when Dad was coming around day six, which somehow felt worse than the asking had. She simply stopped, quietly, the way children do when they’ve absorbed more than anyone realizes.
I kept replaying, obsessively, every single instance Dorian had ever been alone with me over the past year — the pool party, all those countless mugs of coffee across our kitchen table while Grayson worked late — turning each memory over and over in my head, searching for something I might have somehow missed the first time through.
