Chapter 19 Sage
SAGE
When you have three newborns and a sort-of unresolved paternity situation and a best friend you’re not sure you’ve fully forgiven and an ex-boyfriend who will not stop texting, time is a construct.
Twenty-four hours of waiting for a paternity test to shut up my ex-boyfriend, however, makes time creep along slowly.
The babies do not care about any of this.
The babies care about milk and warmth and the specific frequency of the white noise machine that Leigh calibrated before I came home, and they are ruthlessly efficient about communicating their needs regardless of what else is happening in my life.
I respect this about them. For that matter, I aspire to it.
There’s something clarifying about being around creatures who have not yet learned to want things they don’t need.
They are simply, entirely present in their own requirements, no performance, no management of anyone else’s feelings.
Someday they will learn to do all of those things, because the world will teach them to, and I will be sad about it in the way I imagine you are sad about every small loss of innocence.
But right now they’re just here, and loud, and real, and mine.
I’m on hour three of what passes for a morning—feeding Baldy, who is the most patient of the three and also, I’m noticing, the most observant, lying there watching everything with the quiet intensity of someone taking notes—when Leigh knocks.
I let her in because she has a key, it’s easier than not letting her in, and I slept for two hours last night and need someone who is not a newborn to talk to.
Like a saint, she has brought pastries. She sets them on my counter without making it a production and then turns and looks at me with the expression of a woman who has been rehearsing her opening line. “How mad are you still?”
“Honestly?” I shift the baby. “I don’t know. The Connor thing is complicated. I never wanted to hurt him. That was never what I wanted, even after everything, and right now he’s hurting, and part of that is because of how things unfolded at the hospital. So, I’m still processing it.”
“But Ronan—”
“Is turning out to be a genuinely good person, which is helping.”
Leigh sits down at my kitchen table and pulls a pastry from the bag. “Tell me about him. If you want to talk, I mean.”
“There’s not much to tell yet. He’s…” I think about last night.
His hands. The way he talks without wasted words.
The way he looked at me when he said none of my mother’s coldness was in me, like he’d simply assessed the situation and was reporting his findings.
“He’s nothing like I expected him to be. ”
“Expected how?”
“I don’t know. Someone his age, his career, his…
everything. I expected him to be more concerned with how this looks.
It never came up. I thought he’d be more worried about managing it all…
” I look at the baby in my arms. “Instead he just shows up. Helps with the babies. Makes eggs in top hats for dinner and talks to me for hours and tucks a curl behind my ear when he leaves.”
Leigh stares at me. “He made you eggs in top hats?”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“Sage, a cardiologist made you eggs in top hats in your kitchen after helping with your newborn triplets. That is objectively—”
“Don’t,” I say again, but I’m fighting a smile, and she can tell.
“Sweet.” She leans back in her chair with the expression of someone settling in for the long view. “And you like him.”
“I just had his children. It would be strange if I didn’t at least like him.”
“That is not what I mean, and you know it.”
I look at the baby. She looks back at me. She has, I am now fairly certain, Ronan’s brow. That same slight severity, the expression of a person who is reserving judgment. For now.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel. What matters is the test results.”
It’s the test that’s eating at me. Not because I have any uncertainty, but because Connor is on the other end of it. Because Connor is going to have to accept a reality he doesn’t want, and I don’t know how I’ll handle that.
He texts me three times before noon. The first is I hope you slept. The second is I’m serious about the ring. The third is just: Those are my kids, Sage. I know they are.
I don’t respond to any of them. There’s nothing to say that won’t make it worse, and I have enough on my plate without managing Connor’s expectations on top of it.
I was with him for a long time. He commits.
He just commits to the wrong things, in the wrong directions, for reasons he hasn’t fully examined.
I used to think that was a young person’s problem.
That the self-examining would come with time and consequence.
Then I watched him propose marriage to a woman he’d dumped months ago while high on a substance he won’t name, and I revised my assumptions on that.
I hope, not for the first time, that he finds his way to figuring himself out.
Not for my sake. For his. There’s someone in there worth knowing.
I caught glimpses of him in the moments when he stopped performing and just existed.
Making me laugh in a parking lot late at night, working through a difficult client call with a patience that surprised me, sitting on my kitchen floor with a mug of tea he’d made himself and talking about his mother with a sadness so unguarded I didn’t know what to do with it.
That person is real. I want that person to succeed in life.
Without me. God, I hope he doesn’t show up today.
Ronan checks in around midday. A text, brief and considerate. Thinking of you all. Let me know if you need anything.
The contrast is not lost on me.
Leigh stays for most of the morning, and it’s almost like before, except for the thing sitting between us that we haven’t fully dealt with yet.
I can feel her working up to something. “I should have told you,” she says, eventually, over the second round of coffee.
“About Connor and me talking. I should have been honest about how much he’d been calling. ”
“Yes,” I agree. “You should have.”
“I really thought I was helping.”
“I know you did. That’s the complicated part. I know your intentions were good, and it still went badly, and I still needed you to make a different call.” I look at her. “I need to be able to trust that when something involves me, you check with me first. That’s it. That’s all I need.”
She nods. “Okay. That’s fair. But, Sage?”
“Yeah?”
“You should have told me who the father was.”
I blink at her. “What did you just say?”
“I’ve been by your side the whole time. The whole pregnancy. I’ve been here for you, haven’t I?”
“Yeah, but—”
“And you let me believe Connor was the dad.”
Okay, she has a point. I don’t like that. “It was no one’s business—”
“It should have been mine.”
“You should have told me you were bringing Connor to the hospital!”
She snaps, “If you had told me who their father was, I never would have brought him!”
“Okay,” I exhale. “I’m too tired, and I don’t want to fight with you.”
She slowly nods. “I don’t want to fight with you either. It’s just… I felt like an idiot once I learned the truth. We’re close, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s hard to explain. I’m not even sure I know… I just, given that Ronan and I hooked up on his plane on the way back to Boston—”
“Wait, really?”
I nod. “That’s when it happened.”
“Hot.”
I snort. “Yeah. Well, hotness has consequences.” I jut my chin toward the babies.
“It does. Were you embarrassed or something?”
The shrug is involuntary. “I guess. I think I was judging myself for it, and I worried you would too.”
“For the record, I don’t. You were just dumped, and we all do stupid shit when that happens.” She lets out a breath. “So we’re all right?”
Three years of friendship. Three years of bathroom floors at two in the morning and plain toast at ten at night and two websites built with care and precision while I was too hormonal to form coherent sentences and the years before that, being my support and me being there for her too.
Leigh, who is imperfect and occasionally overreaching and fundamentally, genuinely mine.
“We’re working on it. Which is as good as I can do right now.”
She accepts this with a weak smile, and we eat our pastries, and the babies cycle through their needs in rotation. Feed, change, walk, repeat. The day passes the way days pass when you are too tired and too full of feeling to track the hours properly.
Leigh holds the girls while I feed the boy, then holds the boy while I feed the girls in sequence.
She changes diapers without being asked, which earns her significant credit, and she does it with the cheerful competence of someone who has been waiting her whole life for an excuse to do exactly this.
It loosens my knot of Leigh-shaped frustration.
This is the Leigh I know. The one who shows up and does the practical thing and loves me and the people adjacent to me with a fullness that occasionally overflows its banks in ways that cause problems. She’s not a bad person. She made a bad call. That’s all it was.
This is the first time Leigh has let me down in any meaningful way.
And I’m discovering that one real failure, owned cleanly and without deflection, sits differently than I expected it to.
It doesn’t erase our friendship. It complicates things, adds texture, makes the friendship something more than frictionless.
Real, maybe, in a way that frictionless things aren’t.
Forgiveness has never been my strong suit.
Usually, I just move on. Growing up with my mom, I never got an apology.
Rosemary never did anything worth forgiving, and Mom didn’t care if she did or not.
I haven’t had a lot of close girlfriends, given my hobbies—weightlifting, mostly—and going into my field left me without a ton of female interaction except for clients.
And you don’t keep clients by calling them out on their bullshit all the time.
So, I’m not good at forgiving Leigh. But I want to.
She leaves around four, and the cottage goes quiet again in that way I’m starting to recognize—heavy and soft and full of small sounds that resolve into something that feels, against all expectation, like peace.
I get all three babies down at something approaching the same time, which feels like a victory of such magnitude that I sit on the edge of my bed and do nothing for a full two minutes just to honor it.
Then I pick up my phone and look at Ronan’s text. Thinking of you all.
I write back, All alive. Barely. How do people do this with just one?
His response comes back within a minute. Considerable denial and a great deal of tea. Get some sleep.
I put the phone down, and I’m smiling, which feels both entirely natural and completely absurd given everything.
I lie down in the dark and listen to three small people breathe and think about the results coming.
And about Ronan tucking that curl behind my ear in the doorway like it was the most natural thing in the world.
And the kiss.
He does things without making a production of them.
Just picks up a crying baby, just makes eggs in top hats, just reaches out and moves a piece of hair out of my face because apparently it was bothering him and he intended to do something about it.
No preamble. No fuss. Just the quiet confidence of a man who has made a decision and is acting on it, and the warmth of his fingers against my temple, and the way he looked at me in the doorway afterward, like he was very deliberately not pushing further.
So, I did. Couldn’t help it. And even though he left after we kissed, I didn’t feel left. I felt seen. Held. Dare I say, I felt happy.
That thought drifts behind my eyes, and I doze off, safe in the knowledge that I can be happy again. One day.