Chapter 16 Ronan
RONAN
Connor is her ex-boyfriend. My son. Her ex. They broke up in Galway on Saint Patrick’s Day, at which point she got on a plane and sat down next to me.
This is a scenario I wasn’t expecting.
I have delivered news of this magnitude to hundreds of patients and their families.
I have watched people absorb the unabsorbable and then, eventually, proceed.
I have always believed the most useful thing one can do in the moment of impact is stay still and let the person find their own footing rather than rushing to offer a hand they aren’t ready to take.
I find myself at odds with my own footing.
It occurs to me, sitting across from Sage in her hospital room with a newborn between us and the morning light coming gray through the window, that I have never been the one receiving this kind of news before.
When I learned of Aoifa’s fate, it was tragic and horrifying, but it was also over. There were no lingering outcomes regarding her health. No further treatment or changes required—the finality of death closes that door.
This is something else entirely.
I have always been the one delivering this type of news. I’m not entirely sure I am as good at receiving as I am at delivering, but I hope to manage it with at least a passing approximation of grace.
I slept with my son’s girlfriend.
Hours after he ended things with her, on my aircraft, without knowing who she was to him. Without knowing who he was to her. The universe, apparently, has a very particular sense of humor, and I am the punch line.
“You didn’t know who I was to him.” It’s not a question.
I nod. “Not a clue. And you?”
She shakes her head. “Not remotely. I wouldn’t have…”
“Me either.”
But we did.
There’s a beat of silence between us that is not entirely uncomfortable, which under the circumstances is something of an achievement.
Her green eyes flash. “He wasn’t faithful. And he wasn’t sober for a lot of the time. But I cared about him. In the way you care about someone who needs more help than they’ll accept from you.”
I know that particular kind of caring. I have practiced it, with limited success, for the better part of Connor’s adult life. “He told you he was sterile.”
“He said he had a horse-riding accident when he was younger. Some kind of injury. He said doctors had told him he couldn’t father children.” She meets my eyes. “He believed it. I could tell he believed it.”
I file that away. Connor falling from a horse at sixteen—I remember the phone call from Cathryn, clipped and factual as her phone calls always were, telling me he’d been seen in hospital and was fine.
I had not been given details. I had not, I realize now with a clarity that is not comfortable, pushed for them either.
I had accepted her summary the way I accepted most things where Connor was concerned in those years—from a distance, through intermediaries, telling myself that Cathryn had things in hand and my involvement would only complicate matters.
It was not my finest hour. I am aware of that, now more than ever.
“He seemed certain the babies were his,” I say carefully.
She slowly nods. “He’d been drinking. Back then.
A lot. He probably doesn’t remember the last few months of our relationship as clearly as I do.
” A pause. “We hadn’t slept together in two months before Galway, and not there either.
He couldn’t… the drinking made him soft, sorry for the details about your son’s dick.
” She makes the same vague gesture she made before, and I appreciate that she doesn’t belabor the point.
“So the timeline is clear. There was no one else.”
Another nod.
I believe her. I believed her the moment she said it, which is itself notable, because I am not generally a man who extends that particular kind of trust quickly.
I have spent thirty years in medicine developing a calibrated skepticism that serves me well clinically and less well, I will admit, in my personal life.
Aoifa used to say I treated every conversation like a differential diagnosis. She was not wrong.
But this woman, sitting across from me in a hospital bed she has occupied for less than twenty-four hours, tells me the truth with the uncomplicated directness of someone who has decided that honesty is the only currency worth trading in, and something in me simply accepts it.
Without deliberation. Without the usual machinery of assessment.
It is a little alarming.
I hold her gaze. “I am aware that none of this is straightforwardly your fault, and a significant portion of it can be laid at the feet of choices I made—with Connor, over many years, and on that plane. You are the one who has been managing the consequences alone for nine months. That warrants acknowledgment.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then she says, “You didn’t know.”
“No. But I know now.”
The baby in her arms makes a small, restless sound, and she shifts automatically, murmuring something I can’t quite hear, and the baby subsides. I watch her do it, and I feel something shift in my chest that I am not yet prepared to feel.
She had been dumped only hours before. By my son.
She had been told she no longer fit his brand, which is among the more comprehensively awful things I can imagine hearing from a person one has cared about, and she had put on her sunglasses and walked to her gate and sat down and had a conversation with a stranger that was honest and funny and entirely genuine.
She hadn’t been diminished by it. She had simply been herself, and let the rest of it sit somewhere it couldn’t touch her. That’s an inner strength I admire.
I have been trying to understand her since that night. I think I’m beginning to.
I have twin daughters who are twenty-eight years old and brilliant and wholly themselves, and I love them with an ease that still sometimes surprises me, given how badly I managed their early years.
Myrna and Orla were born into grief and difficulty—their mother and I were already straining under the weight of a marriage that was held together by love and stubbornness in roughly equal measure, and I was a medical student who had no business being anyone’s father and became one anyway.
I was not present enough. I was not home enough. I compensated with money and attention when I could give it, and they grew up remarkable in spite of me rather than because of me, and they have been generous enough, as adults, not to say so directly. A fact for which I am forever grateful.
I have a son I have never adequately known.
Connor, who has his mother’s eyes and my jaw and a life I have observed mostly from the edges because I did not know how to insert myself into it without making things worse, and because Cathryn preferred it that way, and because I told myself that was reason enough.
It wasn’t. I know that now, with a certainty I should have arrived at sooner.
And now I have three more, born last night in my own hospital while I was on call, delivered by my own hands, because fate and irony may be the same thing.
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” I say.
“Go ahead.”
“What do you want from me?” I ask. “Not what you expect. Not what you think you’re entitled to ask for. What do you actually want?”
She looks at me for a long moment. “Big picture, I want you to be honest with me. Whatever else happens. Damn the consequences. I’ve had enough of people not being honest with me.”
It is not what I expected her to say. It is, I think, exactly the right answer. “That I can absolutely promise you.”
I go to the bassinet and lift the fussing baby before the grumble can become a full complaint.
She is warm and indignant and smells of something impossibly clean, and she goes quiet almost immediately when I settle her against my chest, as though she has decided I am an acceptable solution to her current problem.
I look down at her. She looks up at me with the dark, unfocused gaze of someone who is still deciding what the world is.
“Hello,” I say quietly. “I’m your father. We have a great deal to sort out, you and I.”
From the bed, Sage makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be something else entirely.
I don’t look up. I keep walking around the room, and the baby keeps her eyes on my face, and outside the window, Boston is getting on with its morning, entirely indifferent to the fact that my life has just comprehensively rearranged itself.
I find, to my considerable surprise, that I don’t mind.
I mind the complexity of the situation, certainly. The harm it will do to Connor when he learns the full shape of it. The time I spent not knowing, and the particular sadness of imagining Sage navigating the pregnancy alone while I was in the city, thinking about her every time I closed my eyes.
“Sage, I have some things outside this room I must handle. Do you—”
“No, please. You’re important around here—”
“As are you. But I still have other duties I must attend.”
“Take all the time you need.” She smiles, and sleep wears at her edges.
I set the baby down and exit, wondering what comes next.