Chapter 20 Ronan
RONAN
I have, over the course of my career, received results that changed everything.
A scan that confirmed what a family feared.
A test that ruled out what a patient dreaded.
Results that arrived too late and results that arrived with time to spare, and all the emotional weight each of those categories carries.
I understand results. I understand what it means to wait for them and what it means to receive them and how the certainty of an outcome does nothing to soften the moment of its delivery.
I am, nonetheless, awake at five forty-five in the morning, which I attribute entirely to professional habit and not at all to the fact that Sage’s text last night is sitting in my phone like a small, warm thing I keep returning to.
I shower. Make tea. Stand at the window of my penthouse and look out at the city getting on with its early morning, all gray light and low cloud and the particular stillness of Boston before it decides to be loud, and I think about my children.
The youngest of them. In a small, warm cottage across town, breathing their loud, reliable breaths, with their mother who has been managing alone for nine months and is still uncertain whether she is enough for them.
It’s the most groundless uncertainty I have encountered in recent memory.
But I understand it, because I carried a version of it myself for years, the particular fear of a parent who is not sure they are equal to the job.
I clear my schedule for the morning. I have not taken leave since Aoifa died.
I have not, if I’m honest, taken leave of any meaningful duration in approximately a decade.
Work has been, for most of my adult life, the thing I do when I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts, and I have consequently become very good at my job and very practiced at being alone with my thoughts in controlled, clinic-appropriate doses only.
The penthouse is quiet and clean and entirely unchanged, and I move through it this morning with the sense of a man whose life has reorganized itself around a new center of gravity that is located, specifically, in a cottage across town.
When Sage calls, it’s a welcome change of pace. Until I hear her tone. “The results are here, and Connor is on his way.”
I’m at Sage’s cottage in half an hour.
She opens the door, looking like she has slept marginally more than the night before, which is progress.
She’s wearing leggings and an oversized sweater, and her hair is in a knot again.
She has a baby in one arm with the already-practiced ease of someone whose body has simply incorporated this as its new default setting. “Hey—”
“Good morning. Have you looked at the results?”
“I wanted to wait.” She steps back to let me in. “Open it with him. Let him see I didn’t alter them or whatever.”
“Wise.” I come in, and she hands me the bald girl she calls Baldy for now. She is the observant one, who regards me with her usual evaluating gravity. We wait in the particular taut quiet of people who know what is coming and are simply waiting for it to become official.
Connor arrives eleven minutes later. I know because I check my watch, not because I’m timing him, but because timing things is a habit so ingrained that I do it without deciding to.
He looks like a man who has been awake longer than I have and has spent the time less productively.
He doesn’t look at me when he comes in, and I don’t press him on anything.
No sense in poking the bear.
I have learned this, slowly and at some cost, over the years of trying to build something with Connor from insufficient materials and too much distance. You cannot manufacture connection. You can only show up and let it develop or not, and accept which of those outcomes you’re given.
“Let’s just do this,” he says.
Sage opens the email on her phone. She reads it once, to herself, and her expression gives nothing away. She would be an exceptional poker player. Then she looks up at Connor as she passes him her phone. “Ronan is the father.”
Connor goes very still. It’s the stillness of a man who has just had confirmed what some part of him already knew and had been fighting.
I watch his face, and I see the moment the fight goes out of it.
What’s left underneath is something I recognize because I have seen it before, in the mirror, in the years after Aoifa.
It is grief, plain and unadorned.
“Connor,” I start.
“Don’t.” He says it quietly, without heat. He’s looking at the floor. “Just don’t, for a minute.”
So, I don’t.
Sage never wanted this for him. I could see that when she talked about him, the weariness of someone who has genuinely cared about a person and is watching them struggle with something she cannot fix. She folds her arms around herself slightly, not coldly but as a kind of private steadying.
“You couldn’t just let me have this,” he says. To himself? To God? I’m not sure who he means.
“Connor—”
“I know.” He pushes a hand through his hair. “I know. It’s not anyone’s fault, is it? That’s the stupid part. Nobody did anything wrong.” He laughs, but it’s the dry, mirthless kind. “Except maybe the timing.”
Sage quietly says, “I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I know you didn’t.” He picks up his jacket from where he’d dropped it on the arm of her sofa. He’s leaving, I can see it, and I have approximately thirty seconds to decide whether to let him go or to say the thing I’ve been turning over since yesterday.
“I want you in their lives,” I say.
He stops. Turns.
“They’re your half siblings. Whatever else is complicated between us, that isn’t. I want them to know you, and I want you to know them.” I pause. “I want to know you, Connor. I know that’s not a simple thing to say at this particular moment. I know the timing is a lot. But I mean it.”
He looks at me for a long moment. His expression is impossible to read, which is not unusual, but I get the sense that he’s actually listening. His jaw works slightly, the way it does when he’s deciding whether to say the true thing or the easier thing. “I’ll call you.”
He leaves. The door closes quietly, and that quietness tells me more than a slam would have. Connor slamming doors is Connor performing. Connor merely closing a door is Connor feeling something he doesn’t know what to do with.
At least I know that about my eldest son.
Sage and I stand in her sitting room in the silence he’s left behind, the baby still in my arms, and the other two making their preliminary sounds from the bedroom, and the morning light coming through the window at that low, winter angle.
“Well,” Sage says. “I suppose that’s that.”
“The dramatic portion, at least.”
She exhales, long and slow, and some of the tension she has been carrying—and she has been carrying a great deal of it, quietly, in the set of her shoulders and the particular careful control of her expression—seems to go with it.
She sits down on the sofa. She looks, for the first time since I walked back into her life almost a week ago, like someone who has set something heavy down and is deciding whether she wants to pick it back up.
She looks at me, and something in her expression shifts—the guard coming down a fraction, the way it does occasionally when she isn’t fully managing it. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you actually want this? Not the babies—I know you want the babies, because you wouldn’t be here otherwise. But…” She gestures between us. “This. All of it. Because you don’t have to want it. I’m not asking for anything you aren’t genuinely offering.”
I look at her for a moment. Then I look down at the baby in my arms, who is looking at her mother with an expression of absolute, uncomplicated devotion.
“To be utterly and completely honest with you, I have spent nine months thinking about you.”
“Why? It was just a hookup.”
“That was the intent, wasn’t it?” I smile, thinking back.
“Regardless of our intent, regardless of going out and trying to connect with someone else, none of that appears to matter to fate. Fate put you at my hospital. On my shift. I don’t know if there’s something else here…
” That feels like a lie, but safety too. “But I’d like the chance to find out.”
She holds my gaze. The silence between us is warm and full and entirely different from the one Connor left behind. “Okay,” she says softly. “Good.”
“The age difference is noticeable. Obviously. There are three children involved. There are all kinds of reasons to keep things low-key. I have three other children—”
“Three? There’s more besides Connor?”
Right. Not sure I’ve mentioned the girls.
“Myrna and Orla are my daughters from my marriage. Twins. Identical when born, not so much now. Too many tattoos and piercings and other style differences between them.” I feel the same smile that stretches my face every time I speak of them, and there’s no stopping it.
“Myrna is an artist. Any medium you put in front of her, she can shape it into what she wants. Beautiful work. Orla is a photographer, mostly of celebrity portraiture. You’ve likely seen her pictures in magazines or online.
They are far too talented for me to claim anything regarding their artistry. ”
Sage grins. “You are a very proud papa.”
“I am. They have always given me a reason to be.”
“It’s sweet how you adore them so much. I hope it’ll be that way for me with the kids.”
“No, it won’t be.”
She stares at me. “Why would you say that?”
“It’ll be better.” I settle into my seat. “My girls were born to me when I was a haggard medical student. I didn’t have the time I needed for them. I was… The early years were a blur of tests and work and all-nighters. Truly, the worst time to have kids…”
She lets me drone on about college and residency, and the longer I do, the deeper the triplets sleep in the next room.
As I wrap up, I realize it’s gone dark outside. “Strange day.”
“How’s that?” she asks.
“I haven’t gone on about my uni days in a very long time.”
“I like listening to you talk.” Sage comes closer. “I like watching your mouth move.”
“Do you?”
She smiles and slowly nods. “I like thinking about what that mouth can do.”
I shoot my gaze to her lips. “Same here.”
I’m not sure which of us moves first, but we kiss, and it’s as though everything goes right with the world all at once. She clutches my collar, holding me to her, and the small imposition of her fingertips against my throat does something to me.
I pull her closer, and without meaning to, onto my lap. Or maybe she works her way there. It’s hard to know where I end and she begins when her tongue slides across mine. I lace my fingers into her hair, and she sighs in my mouth. Eager. Warm. Ravenous.
But she comes up for air. “You know I can’t—”
“I know. You don’t need to remind me, Sage. I am happy to take whatever you want to give me.”
She smiles, then kisses me again, making the edges of the world blur in the best way possible. It is heaven just to touch her. Kissing is something beyond that limit.
I could fall for this woman. I know that in every bone in my body.
Maybe some part of me already has.