Chapter 15 Sage
SAGE
The thing about having triplets is that the moment you think you have one of them sorted, the other two stage a coordinated revolt.
I’ve been in this hospital room for less than twenty-four hours and I’ve already learned this lesson approximately eight times.
I’m currently feeding the dark-haired girl—the one I’ve privately started calling Bossy, because she screams the loudest and longest until she gets what she wants, which I respect—while the bald girl and the boy fuss at a low, warning simmer in their bassinets by the window.
Naming is… on my ever-growing to-do list, so for now, it’s Bossy, Baldy, and Boy.
Ronan asks, “May I?” Then gestures to the basinet. I’m only too happy to have another pair of hands, so I nod. He slowly walks Boy around, cooing at him. He’s still in his scrubs. There is something deeply unfair about how good he looks in them.
Not that I notice all that much. I focus on Bossy, who is feeding.
“She’s got a good latch,” he observes from across the room, and I look up to find him watching me with the same calm, assessing expression he’s been wearing since he walked back through my door this morning.
Clinical, mostly. But there’s something underneath it that I recognize, because I’ve seen it before—on a plane, in the dark, when he looked at me like I was something he intended to pay very close attention to.
“The nurse spent forty minutes helping me figure that out. Rose. She’s a saint. I’m leaving her everything in my will.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “I’ll pass along the compliment.”
“Please do.” I shift Bossy slightly and wince. “Also, nobody warned me that this would feel like being chewed on by something with no teeth but enormous commitment.”
He has one of those smiles that seems to surprise even him, like it escaped before he could decide whether to let it out.
Boy has gone quiet. Ronan looks down at him briefly, then back at me, and the moment stretches in a way that I don’t entirely know what to do with, given that I am sitting in a hospital bed with a baby attached to my chest and my hair in a knot that has not been intentional for at least six hours.
“Can I ask you something?” he says.
“You’re holding my baby and you’ve seen me at my absolute worst. I think you’ve earned a question.”
That earns me another flicker of the smile. He settles into the chair beside the window, the boy still cradled against his chest, and looks at me with an expression that is measured and careful and also, underneath all of that, genuinely curious. “How long have you been in Boston?”
“Four years. Came for a training position at a gym in Back Bay, stayed because I liked it.” I pause. “You?”
“Most of my adult life, with occasional interruptions for conferences and family obligations.” He tilts his head slightly. “You’ve been managing this pregnancy on your own the entire time.”
It isn’t quite a question, but it has the shape of one. “I have.”
“That’s—” He stops. Recalibrates. I watch him choose his words with the care of a man who has learned, probably the hard way, that some sentences cannot be unsaid. “That must have been a great deal to carry alone.”
“I had Leigh,” I say, and then feel the complicated weight of that settle over me, because Leigh was there, right up until she walked Connor through that door this morning and blew everything sideways.
“She’s my best friend and neighbor. She built my website, helped me pivot my training business online when my blood pressure got complicated, brought me food when I couldn’t stand the smell of anything that wasn’t plain toast.” I look down at the baby.
“She’s been incredible. I just—I don’t know why she brought him here. I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
“Him?”
Right. He doesn’t know. “My ex.”
“Perhaps she thought it was the right thing to do.” His voice is neutral. Not defending Leigh, exactly. Just leaving room.
“Maybe.” I’m not ready to be generous about it yet. “It wasn’t, but maybe she thought it was.”
He nods slowly, and I appreciate that he doesn’t push.
He just lets it sit there, which is not something most people do.
Most people, when they ask how you’re doing, are already forming their response before you’ve finished answering.
Ronan listens like he actually intends to do something with what he hears.
I noticed that on the plane too.
“What is it that you actually want to know?” I ask, because I can feel it—there’s a question underneath the questions, and we’re both dancing around it with the elaborate courtesy of two people who have seen each other naked and are now pretending to be strangers.
He considers me for a moment. The baby in his arms makes a small, satisfied sound and goes entirely limp against his chest, and Ronan glances down at him with an expression that cracks something open in me that I’m not prepared to examine right now.
“I want to know,” he says carefully, “whether there is any possibility—any at all—that I am not their father.”
I’d been expecting this. I’m not offended by it. I’d ask the same thing in his shoes.
“No.” I swallow, hoping he doesn’t freak out.
“There’s only you in that time period. My ex and I hadn’t slept together in two months before I got on that plane.
Some kind of horseback riding injury, he said.
” I make a vague gesture that I hope communicates the rest of that sentence without me having to say it.
“Anyway. The timeline is clear. There was no one else.”
Something moves across his face. It isn’t quite what I expected—not relief, not panic. Something more complicated than either.
“Alright then,” he says, after a moment.
We look at each other across the room, and I think, not for the first time, that this is genuinely one of the stranger situations two people can find themselves in.
I know what he sounds like when he loses control.
I know the weight of his hands and the particular way he said my name in the dark, low and deliberate, like he was tasting it.
“So,” I say, because the silence is starting to do things to me. “Full-service doctor, then.”
He blinks. “I beg your pardon?”
“You delivered my babies, managed my blood pressure, came back this morning to check on me, and you’re currently holding one of them so I can eat my terrible hospital breakfast in something approaching peace.
” I nod at the tray on my bedside table, which has been getting cold for the better part of an hour. “That’s full service.”
“Ah.” He glances down at the baby, then back at me. “I suppose it is, when you put it that way.”
“Is this part of the standard package, or am I a special case?”
There it is again—that smile, faster this time, like he’s stopped trying to catch it before it gets out. “I would say that you are a somewhat exceptional circumstance.”
“Exceptionally inconvenient?”
“No. You’re not that.”
I stare down at my baby, trying to formulate what to say next, and I’m at a loss. I just told him the Big Deal, and he’s calm and collected, while I’m ready to lose my mind.
“She looks like you,” Ronan says quietly, from across the room.
I look up. He’s watching us with an expression that has gone somewhere unguarded, somewhere past the careful composure, and my chest does something inconvenient and involuntary in response. “The boy might have your coloring. It’s too early to tell, I think.”
“My hair was dark before it decided to do—this.” He nods upward, indicating the silver, and I have to actively resist smiling, because the self-deprecating gesture is so at odds with the rest of him—with the authority he carries so naturally, with the way everyone in that delivery room last night moved when he spoke.
“How old were you when it went?” I ask.
“Forty-three.” A pause. “Practically overnight, or so it felt. My sister Mary said it made me look distinguished. I’m not entirely sure she meant it as a compliment.”
I laugh, and it’s the first real laugh I’ve managed since yesterday, loose and unpracticed, and it startles all three babies, who collectively decide this is the moment to express their displeasure.
The two in the bassinets ramp up immediately, and the one Ronan is holding opens his eyes and looks personally offended.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say, though I’m still half smiling. “Okay. Crisis.”
Ronan is already moving. He sets the boy gently back in his bassinet and lifts Baldy before the crying can fully escalate, and I watch him do it—this middle-aged silver-haired cardiologist in scrubs, holding a screaming infant with the same unhurried competence he apparently applies to everything—and I think, with a clarity that surprises me: I am in so much trouble.
Between the two of us, we get all three to a manageable volume within a few minutes, and then we’re just sitting in my small hospital room, each holding a baby, in the particular exhausted quiet that follows a minor emergency.
“I have to tell you something,” Ronan says, after a moment.
“Okay.”
He meets my eyes. “The man your friend brought in this morning. Your ex.” A pause, measured and deliberate. “Connor.”
“You know him?”
He holds my gaze, and I can see him deciding to just say it, plainly, the way I appreciated him doing everything else. “He’s my son.”
The bed drops out from under us, and it takes blinking a few times before it comes back. “Connor. Connor Bird. Is your son.”
“Yes.”
I look down at the baby in my arms. Then back up at Ronan. Then down again. “Huh.” Genuinely, it’s the only word I have.
Ronan waits. He’s good at that. He has the particular patience of someone who has delivered bad news in professional settings for decades and understands that the person on the receiving end needs a moment to let it reorganize inside them before they can respond to it usefully.
I appreciate it. But I need him to fill in the blanks. “Does he know? That you’re—that you’re his father?”
“He knows,” Ronan says. “We don’t have the kind of relationship that knowledge has done much to build, I’m afraid.”
I absorb that. There is an entire story in that sentence, and I don’t have the first chapter of it yet. But I can hear the weight of it in his voice. He’s not happy about the situation.
“Okay. So just to be clear about where we are…” I look at the baby in my arms, then at the one in Ronan’s, then at the third in the bassinet who has somehow managed to fall back asleep through all of this, because apparently she has inherited my ability to choose the most inconvenient possible moment to disengage.
“These three are yours. And the man who thought they were his is also yours.”
“That is an accurate summary, yes.”
“Huh.”
He watches me with that careful, steady attention. “You’re handling this remarkably well.”
“I’m not,” I tell him honestly. “I’m just very tired, and when I’m very tired, I go quiet instead of loud. Give me eight hours of sleep, and I’ll probably have a lot more feelings about this.”
“That seems reasonable.” He sighs at the baby in his arms. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. For the entirety of the situation.”
I look at him. He means it. “And how are you taking it?”
A nervous laugh escapes him, and he looks confused.
I didn’t know he could ever be nervous about anything. In what little experience I have of him, nervousness is not in his vocabulary. No wonder he’s so bad at it.