Chapter 18 Ronan
RONAN
I already know the result of the test, but if it will settle Connor’s mind… “Of course.”
Silence from him. Sage worries her bottom lip, like he’ll give her more grief. Eventually, though, he says, “Fine. Fine, do your stupid test. It doesn’t matter. Those babies are mine, and your test is going to prove it. Don’t expect me to be gracious about it when it does, Ronan.”
His anger regarding me and Sage is to be expected, I suppose. Even though he had unceremoniously dumped her before we hooked up, he’s entitled to his unreasonable anger on the matter. “I don’t expect anything but the result of the test to be accepted.”
“I never expect you to be gracious, Connor,” Sage says, without heat. “I just need you to agree to the test.”
“I agreed. Did you not hear me agree?” He hangs up.
Sage picks up her phone, looks at it for a moment, and puts it face-down on the cushion. Then she picks up her tea again.
“He’ll come around.” I’m not entirely sure this is true, but I say it because it is what I’m working toward, and working toward a thing is the first step to it being true.
She looks at me. “You don’t have to manage my feelings about Connor, you know. I’m not fragile on that score.”
“I know you’re not.” I pause. “I suppose I’m managing my own.”
“Connor was here earlier,” she says.
“I gathered. You were telling him you wouldn’t marry him when I arrived, so…?”
“He proposed when he was here.”
I keep my expression level. “Did he?”
She wraps both hands around her mug. “He believes what he believes. I think part of him always will, regardless of what a test says. That’s just how he’s built.”
The flat, armored look in Connor’s eyes in the hospital corridor comes to mind, alongside the rawness underneath it. I spent years watching from the edges of his life, waiting for an invitation I should have understood he didn’t know how to extend. And now, the shape of his family shifts once more.
It is little surprise he’s not taking the news well.
Sage’s cottage is small and warm and smells of vanilla, which I notice immediately and then make a concerted effort to stop noticing, with limited success.
There are baby things arranged with the efficient logic of someone who has thought carefully about workflow.
The changing supplies are within arm’s reach of the cribs, the feeding chair positioned near the window where the morning light comes in.
There’s so much about Sage I don’t know. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to learn more about you, considering… everything. Tell me about yourself.”
She raises an eyebrow. “That’s a broad question.”
“It is. Take it whatever direction you like.”
She’s quiet for a moment, considering. Then she says, “I think I mentioned when we met that I’m a personal trainer. I have half a physical education degree. I left when money ran out and meant to go back, but I haven’t yet.”
“A common story among techs at the hospital is that they started medical school and ran out of money, so they went in for a medical trade instead. It’s admirable, still chipping away at what you want.”
She smiles. “I grew up between Boston and a little town in North Carolina with my sister Rosemary, who is infinitely more organized than I am. She runs security for a laboratory there, which should tell you everything about the difference between us.” A pause, with hesitation.
“My father left when I was four and died a few years later. My mother…”
She stops. Dead stops.
“Is she well?”
A quick nod. “My mother is alive, and we aren’t close.” She says that last part without drama, in the same tone she uses for everything else, and it is somehow more affecting for the flatness of it.
I know this tone. I’ve used versions of it myself, in the years after Aoifa, when people asked how I was managing and I said fine in a way that did not invite further inquiry.
The flat tone is not indifference. It’s the voice of someone who has made their peace with a thing they didn’t choose and has decided that making noise about it serves no one.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.
“That’s just life, I guess. Not everyone should be a mom.” She looks at the babies in their cribs through the open bedroom door. “I think about it more now. What kind of mother I want to be. Whether the things she didn’t give me are things I’ll know how to give.”
“What things do you most want to give them?” I ask.
“The sense that I wanted them. Not just that I love them, because I think love can be complicated and conditional and people still say it. But that they were wanted. That me being their mother is something I choose, every day, not something I’m enduring.”
“Even though they were an accidental situation?”
“I won’t lie to them about that—they deserve the truth about how they came into the world. But…” She pauses. “My mother endured me. I always knew that. I don’t want them to ever know that feeling.”
“Then, they were a surprise. Not an accident.”
She smiles a little at that. “Yeah. A surprise. That sounds a lot nicer than an accident.”
“What else didn’t your mother give you?”
She considers this seriously, which I appreciate. “Warmth. Consistency. The sense that I was her first priority rather than her greatest inconvenience.”
“No child should be made to feel that way.” Even while saying the words, I wonder whether Connor ever felt that way, and the thought wounds me.
“The last thing she ever expected was to be a single mother, and she spent the rest of my childhood making sure I knew that.”
I sit with that for a moment. There is so much I could say, and most of it would be inadequate, so instead I say the thing I actually believe. “You’ll never let them feel that way.”
“You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“You’re passionate and determined, and you’re looking at those three children right now the way I have seen very few parents look at a child. Like they are the most important thing that has ever happened to you, and you would burn the world down before you’d let anything touch them.”
She is very still for a moment. “That’s how it feels.”
“I know.” I look at my tea. “I felt the same way when mine were born.”
We sit in the warmth of her cottage for another hour, talking about things that don’t matter and things that do, and somewhere in the middle of it, the babies all sleep at once. We both go very quiet and still, as though any sudden movement might break it.
Our voices slide to a quieter register in hopes of not waking them. Our question-and-answer session ends up in a silly place. She asks, appalled, “Eighties pop?”
“Don’t turn your nose up at it—you like modern pop.”
She laughs, then worries and pauses for a moment. When no baby fusses, she continues, “Because it’s good.”
“As is the pop of the eighties.”
“Okay, sure.” She rolls her eyes. “But you have to admit—the best movie genre is definitely rom-coms.”
“Action.”
“No!”
I laugh at her astonishment. “Anything starring Jason Statham.”
“Oh my God,” she says, laughing quietly.
“Not what you expected?”
“You’re all… grown-up and mature—”
“I can’t like action movies because I’m old?”
She grins. “I figured you for documentaries.”
I clutch at my chest. “You wound me.”
She giggles, and it’s the sweetest sound. But it’s enough to disturb the babies. During a round of feeding, diaper changes, and tucking them back in, I offer to make her supper with whatever is in the fridge. She calls out from the bedroom, “I don’t know what you’ll find in there.”
I find bread and eggs. “Eggs in top hats?”
“Yes, please.” Once she’s finished and dinner is on the table, she smiles at her plate. “Haven’t had these since I was a kid. What was your childhood like?”
“Spoiled rotten.”
“Really?”
I nod once. “To the core, in fact. Though only in proportion to my grades, as was the rule for my siblings and me. Being that our family founded Callahan Labs, we had more money than my parents knew what to do with. So, they set up rules for us, which we abided by for the most part.”
“Sounds magical.”
Thinking on what she said about her own, I’m once again reminded of how lucky I was. “I will always be grateful for the childhood I had. It’s part of why I donate to a number of youth organizations in the area. Every kid should get the best start possible.”
She raises her tea to me in salute. “Agreed.”
After many hours, I find myself not wanting to leave, which is a feeling I haven’t had in a very long time. Her cottage is quite homey, but it’s more than that. Far more.
When I finally go, she walks me to the door. And before I’ve fully decided to, I reach out and tuck a dark curl behind her ear, very gently, because it has been bothering me for an hour and because I cannot seem to stop myself.
She looks up at me. And there it is, that same current from the plane, the same pull, entirely unchanged by nine months and three babies and the complicated geometry of our situation.
I do not wish to leave. Not now. But I force myself to say the words. “Good night, Sage.”
“Good night, Ronan,” she says.
Neither of us moves. Not at first.
But then Sage closes the gap, and when we meet in the middle, and my lips press to hers, something in my chest goes tight and free at the same time. All day long, I have yearned for this exact moment, and it does not disappoint.
But then she pulls back. “I’m sorry—my hormones are all over the place, and I think I misread—”
“You misread nothing. But you’re also not in a position to be making any big decisions right now due to your hormones and all the drugs we pumped you full of, and I must respect that.
Which is part of why I’m leaving now, because…
” A sigh breaks from me as I press my forehead to hers.
“If I don’t leave now, I will kiss you. Again and again, until I find it impossible to leave tonight. ”
She smiles. “I can’t have sex tonight. Or for the next eight weeks. According to the nurses.”
“I am well aware. But I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about you. The longer I’m with you, the more I don’t want to be without you. So, I bid you good evening, love.” With every ounce of strength I have, I turn on my heel and make it to my car before I allow myself to smile.
She calls out, “I know what you mean, Ronan. I don’t like seeing you leave. Good night.” Then she closes the door.
I sit behind the wheel for a moment without starting the engine. Just breathing. Sorting through it all.
The city moves around me, unhurried. Someone walks a dog past the end of her street.
A light goes on in the upstairs window of the house across from hers.
A couple passes on the pavement, close together against the cold, talking quietly.
The ordinary evening business of people who have no idea that the man sitting in the parked car outside number fourteen has, in the past four days, had his entire life reorganized by a woman he met in an airport.
I have lived in this city for the better part of my adult life and I have never once driven past this cottage or this street, and now I’m sitting outside it at nine in the evening having just tucked a curl behind the ear of the mother of my children and I am fifty-two years old and I am smiling in my car like a man who has entirely lost the run of himself.
Aoifa would have found this hilarious. She had a gift for finding the comedy in the things I took most seriously about myself, and she was nearly always right to. I miss her every time when life does something that would have made her laugh.
I am in considerable trouble.
I am mostly certain I hear Aoifa say, “Good.”