Chapter 17 Sage
SAGE
Bringing three babies home from the hospital is, as it turns out, a logistical operation of moderate complexity, even with help.
Leigh is helping, which means I am grateful and quietly furious rather than loudly furious.
I haven’t yet figured out how to hold both feelings at the same time without one of them winning, so my voice goes from irritated and loud to quiet and simmering, with little control on my end.
Leigh carries two of the car seats up the front path of my cottage while I carry the third and my overnight bag, and she does it with the careful, slightly over-solicitous energy of someone who knows they have done a thing that requires repair and is not yet sure what form the repair should take.
I know this energy. It’s the same way she talks to clients she knows are pissed off. I don’t say anything until the babies are in their cribs inside my place.
My bedroom has been transformed in my absence—Leigh changed it into something that actually resembles a functional nursery.
Three matching cribs along the far wall.
A changing table with military precision organization.
Stacked diapers, wipes, a white noise machine humming softly in the corner.
It’s thoughtful and practical and exactly what I needed, and I stand in the doorway looking at it, feeling the particular exhausted overwhelm of someone whose body and brain have both reached their respective limits.
“Leigh,” I start.
“I know,” she says, from behind me.
“I’m not—” I stop. Start again. “I’m grateful. For all of this. The room, the website, the help… I need you to know that isn’t lost on me.”
“But,” she says.
“But you brought him to the hospital.” I turn around, and she’s wincing. At least she knows she fucked up. “You brought Connor to the hospital without asking me. Without telling me. You walked him into my room while I was postpartum, and he upset my babies.”
Leigh looks at me steadily, and to her credit, she doesn’t flinch. “I thought he was their father. I thought you’d want him there.”
“You assumed. You didn’t ask. You made that call on my behalf without consulting me, and it went badly, and now I’m dealing with—” I gesture vaguely at the general shape of everything. “All of this.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “He kept calling me. After he found out you’d had them. He was beside himself, Sage. I know you don’t want to hear that, but he was.”
“And how did he find out? Who the hell would tell…”
The look on her face tells me everything.
“You… you told him.”
Her voice slips quiet. “I thought he had a right to know. I’m sorry, Sage.”
I look at her. Leigh, who built me two websites while I was too nauseated to work, who brought me plain toast at ten at night without being asked, who sat on my bathroom floor with me at two in the morning when the pregnancy felt like too much, and talked me through it until I could breathe again.
Leigh, who made a bad call and is standing here owning it without excuses, which is more than most people manage.
I can respect that last part. But the rest of it is too much for me to handle right now.
“Okay.”
She exhales. “Do you need anything before I go?”
“No. I’m going to sleep when they sleep, which according to every book is the only strategy that works, and they’re starting to doze off.”
She squeezes my arm on her way out, and I lock the door behind her and stand in my cottage alone for the first time in…
I don’t even know how long. Months, possibly.
There is always someone around when you’re very pregnant and then when you’ve just given birth, always a nurse or a visitor or a well-meaning person with an opinion about your body and your choices and your future.
Right now, there’s just me and three sleeping babies and the particular, specific silence of a house that knows everything has changed.
I stand in the doorway of my own bedroom, which is no longer just my bedroom but also a nursery, and I look at the cribs Leigh has arranged along the far wall with the care of someone who loves me and wanted to do something tangible with that love, and I let myself feel the full weight of where I am.
I am twenty-six years old. I have half a degree, a fitness business, and a cottage with good light and a landlord who lets me paint the walls.
I have no partner and no co-parent lined up and no roadmap for what comes next, and I have three human beings who are entirely dependent on me to figure it out.
Yes, Ronan is around, but at what capacity? I have no idea. The way he makes it sound, he wasn’t around much for Connor, so why should I expect more than that?
I have felt afraid before. I know what fear feels like in my body. Tight across the chest, fast in the hands, that specific vertigo of ground that used to be solid deciding to shift.
What I’m feeling right now is different.
It is not the absence of fear, exactly. It’s something heavier and stiller and more permanent than fear.
It’s the knowledge that I would do absolutely anything for these three people I have known for less than two days, and that this knowledge is not going anywhere.
I sit on the edge of my bed and look at them.
All three in a row, breathing in the reliable, faintly audible way of new humans who have not yet learned to be quiet about it.
Two girls and a boy. My chest does something that I don’t have a name for yet.
It’s something that isn’t quite love, because love is too small a word, but is in that direction, enormous and unconditional and slightly terrifying.
“Okay,” I tell them softly. “Time for sleep?” They yawn in different intervals, and I find myself joining them.
I haven’t slept for long when someone knocks on the door. When I open it, Connor is standing on my front step with his arms full of shopping bags. He looks different from the hospital. Less raw. His jaw is set. Shoulders back.
“What are you—”
“I don’t want to fight,” he says immediately. “I just want to help.”
Hence, the bags. Despite myself, I clock what’s in them. A proper baby monitor, the expensive kind with a camera. A subscription box of diapers in three sizes. A meal delivery service gift card. Practical things. Useful things. Not the grand romantic gesture kind of things.
I am too tired to turn away practical and useful. “Fine,” I say, and stand aside.
He brings everything in and sets it down in the kitchen without being asked to and doesn’t try to see the babies, which earns him marginal credit.
I make tea while he arranges it all. We sit at my kitchen table.
He wraps both hands around his mug and looks at me with an expression I recognize.
The one he gets when he’s about to say something he has rehearsed.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says.
“Connor—”
“Just let me say it.” He meets my eyes. “These past few months, watching your content, seeing you do all of this on your own… I’ve been an idiot.
I know that. And whatever you say about the babies, I know what I felt when I thought they were mine, and I don’t want to lose that.
I want to do this properly. I want to be here. ”
He puts a ring box on the table.
I stare at it for a long moment. It’s a nice box. Velvet, navy blue, the kind from an actual jeweler rather than a mall chain.
“Are you high?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, without missing a beat. “But I bought the ring sober, and I mean every word sober, and I’ll ask you again in the morning if that helps.”
I almost laugh. Almost. He’s being as sincere as he can manage, so I don’t. But I have to be clear. “Connor. The babies aren’t yours.”
“You slept with someone else—you made that clear enough when you said it the first time. But, baby, you forgave me when I cheated, and I forgive you too—”
I cut him off with a laugh. “Excuse me?”
He shrugs. “I made a mistake. We acknowledged, and we moved on. I can do the same for you. I’m not a hypocrite.”
I suck in and blow out a big breath, trying not to scream at him. “Connor. When I slept with someone else, it was after you dumped me for not fitting into your brand. We were not together. We have not been together for over nine months—”
“And whose fault is that? I tried to make things right between us—”
“Stop.” I wait until I have his full attention again. “I didn’t cheat on you. I did sleep with someone else, and that someone is the father.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. I know exactly who their father is, and it’s not you.
You and I hadn’t slept together for over two months before I got pregnant.
” I push the ring box back across the table.
“And I don’t want to marry you. I didn’t want to marry you when we were together, and I don’t want to now.
And my babies are not your legacy. You need to find that in yourself. ”
His expression cycles through several things. Hurt, then stubbornness, then something that looks, briefly, like he actually heard me. “Who is he?”
I open my mouth. Close it. The babies are sleeping, and he will lose his shit when I tell him. “That’s not a conversation for right now.”
“I think it fucking is. Who is he?”
Fine. He won’t let it rest, and the sooner we get this over with, the better. Probably.
“Dr. Ronan Callahan.”
He chirps a laugh at first. But when I don’t respond, his face goes slack. “You’re fucking joking—”
“I’m not.”
He’s shaking his head before I even say the words. “You are. Because that’s fucked up, even for you.”
Not sure what he means by that, and honestly, I don’t even care right now. “Believe me or don’t, but it’s the truth.”
“My dad. He’s the father of your kids. You slept with my father.” He turns a little green.
I nod once.
He wants to push, but instead he puts the ring back in his pocket and stands up. “For the record, I don’t fucking believe you. When you’re ready to talk about this like an adult, call me.”
There’s nothing else to say, so I walk him to the door, and he goes, which is the most mature thing he’s done in a while, and I lean against the closed door for a moment in the quiet.
Then I go and check on the babies, who have slept through the entire thing and are still breathing their loud, reliable, perfect breaths.
I’m in the middle of feeding Baldy when someone knocks on the door again.
Fuck. It’s Connor. Has to be. Here to nag me into marrying him, I’m sure of it.
I put the baby against my shoulder and call through the door. “Connor, I am not marrying you. I will never marry you, and I need you to go home.”
In an accent that is very definitively not Connor’s, a man calls out, “I’m not Connor.”
I open the door.
Ronan is standing on my front step in a dark coat, no scrubs, looking like he hasn’t slept in days. He looks at me, then at the baby on my shoulder, and smiles. “I wanted to see how you were settling in.”
“That’s—” I step back to let him in. “That’s actually really nice. Come in.”
He comes in, and I close the door, and the cottage feels immediately different with him in it. Warmer, somehow. More settled. I’m not sure what to do with that, so I hand him the baby and go to put the kettle on.
I listen to him from the kitchen. He doesn’t know I’m listening, or maybe he does—he’s a perceptive man.
But I can hear him talking to her, low and unhurried, the same tone he uses with all three of them, like he’s just having a conversation rather than trying to soothe.
Like he thinks they’re worth talking to properly, even now, even at three days old.
My mother talked to me the way you talk to a problem.
Efficiently. At intervals. With the particular brevity of a woman who had things to get back to.
I told myself it didn’t matter, and then I spent all that time with Connor, who talked to me the same way, and I told myself that didn’t matter either.
Then I had three babies, and a fifty-two-year-old man walked into my hospital room and started talking to my children like they were people, and something in me broke. I’m not sure how to handle it.
I bring him tea and sit down across from him and look at him holding my daughter in the lamplight. I need to deal with this paternity situation immediately, before I do something inadvisable. “I’m going to need to call Connor. There’s something we need to get done.”
He nods once. “Very well.”
I call Connor. “I’m putting you on speaker. Ronan is here too.”
“Hello, Connor.”
“What are you doing there?” he asks, very confused.
I’ve already told him why Ronan would be here, so I don’t repeat myself. “I want a paternity test, Connor. Let’s put this to bed, once and for all. Both of you will get tested. Agreed?”