Shanann Watts canceled the gender reveal party for her unborn child after texting a friend that Chris Watts was “scared to death about this third baby” and did not want another one. In messages sent on Aug. 7, 2018, she said he was happy with Bella and Celeste, their two daughters, and that he had told her they were “not compatible anymore.”

The texts, sent 12 days before the party had been scheduled for Aug. 19, 2018, show the 40-year-old mother trying to hold together a marriage that was already breaking apart. Shanann Watts said Chris Watts refused to hug her after saying he would try to work it out, and that when she grabbed his hand during an ultrasound appointment, he did not hold back.

She wrote that she had not slept most of the week and that her eyes burned from crying so much. “I canceled gender reveal. Nicki is going to tell me [the baby's gender] today. I need happy news today,” she texted, adding a brief window into how badly she wanted something positive while she was preparing to welcome her third child.

Nicki Atkinson was the only person who had been told the baby was a boy, and the child would have been named Nico if he had been born. The baby never got that chance. Six days after the date the party had been set for, Shanann Watts was killed by Chris Watts, who later confessed to cheating on her with Nichol Kessinger and to strangling her to death with his bare hands during an argument.

Watts is now serving a life sentence for the murders of his wife and children. The texts matter because they capture the final days before the killings with unusual clarity: a pregnant woman, a canceled celebration and a marriage that had already collapsed in private, even if the full horror would not be known until after she was gone.