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“So you all went to the bar and knocked up the first woman you saw?” I asked.
Brady barked a laugh. “That was my idea.Thisguy talked me out of it.”
“We decided to try IVF,” Asher patiently explained. “It was difficult on short notice, but we found a surrogate who was willing to carry our eggs.”
“Really?” I asked.
Asher nodded. “It was quite expensive—both for the procedure, and to pay the surrogate fee. They implanted eighteen eggs. Six for each of us.”
“Eighteen?”I asked incredulously. “Like you’re playing skee-ball with her uterus?”
Brady shook his head. “Nah, that shit’s normal for IVF.”
“Even with eighteen implanted eggs, the odds of a successful implantation are quite low,” Asher said. “I believe we had slightly greater than a fifty-fifty chance.”
“All that money for a coin-flip,” Brady muttered. “Seems crazy, looking back on it. But you gotta understand we were desperate.”
“I get it,” I said, although I didn’t get it at all. I had never been in that situation, and God willing, I never would be.
Asher tried to sip his beer, found that it was empty, and then placed the can on the coffee table. “We made a pact before shipping out. Whoever survived the deployment would raise the child as their own. Since we used eighteen eggs fertilized by each of us, we wouldn’t know who the father was.”
“Could have done a blood test,” I pointed out.
“Didn’t want to.” Asher shrugged. “It didn’t matter. All we cared about was our brotherhood, and ensuring a piece of us lived on regardless of what transpired in Afghanistan.”
Brady cleared his throat. “As you can see, all three of us made it back alive.”
“Woah, spoilers!” I said.
“Got lucky with the IVF treatment, too,” Brady continued. “Were hoping for just one egg, but three ended up implanting. We returned home in time to see the triplets born.”
“It was a difficult situation,” Asher explained. “We had spent the entire deployment thinking we might die. Then, within a few weeks of returning home, we were fathers to triplets. We were all roommates, so we raised them together. It quickly became obvious which child was whose. No blood test was required.”
“Cora was the spitting image of Asher,” Brady said. “Fair-skinned, blonde hair, sapphire-blue eyes.”
“You sound like you have a crush on him.”
Brady barked a laugh. “He’s a pretty boy. No denying it.”
“He is,” I agreed with a smile. Asher’s cheeks darkened.
“Dustin was obviously mine,” Brady said, grinning like a proud father. “Same black curls, same attitude. Also, he cried whenever anyone else tried to hold him. I was the only one he was good with.”
Asher nodded. “Micah was more difficult. We were not sure until he grew older. But now we are certain. He has red hair and freckles like our surrogate, but otherwise he looks exactly like Rogan did when he was a child.”
“And here we are,” Brady said with finality. “Six years later, we’re still raising them together. They’re triplets, so it would’ve been fucked up to split them up. Ya know?”
I frowned. “That must be hard by yourselves. Without any help.”
“We’re not by ourselves,” Brady said. “We’ve got the three of us. Three’s more than two. Fifty percent more parents than a traditional couple. That’s just math, right Asher?”
“Three is indeed fifty percent more than two,” Asher said dryly.
Brady nodded as if he had agreed with him genuinely, rather than sarcastically. “Overall, it’s great. Only problem is how much we work. First few years getting the company off the ground, then expanding to other cities, and now running it all… The work never gets easier. And, uh, we’ve kind of slacked off with the parenting. Which explains their behavior.”
“It explains Micah’s and Dustin’s behavior,” Asher corrected.
Brady groaned and rolled his eyes. “Don’t act like you had anything to do with her quiet personality. It was a lucky coin flip, is all.”
