Chapter 21 Sage
SAGE
Moving forward should be the natural thing to do. But life keeps dragging me backward, and I’m really tired of it.
The morning after the paternity results is the first morning in months that I wake up without an unresolved thing sitting on my chest like a second mortgage.
The babies are still here. The situation is still complicated.
I still have three newborns and half a degree and a fitness business I’m running from my phone.
None of the practical realities have changed.
But the unresolved thing is resolved, and I didn’t understand how much space it was taking up until it was gone.
I get four and a half minutes of lying in the gray morning light before Bossy registers an opinion about breakfast. This is, I’m learning, roughly the maximum available window.
Bossy does not believe in prolonged silence.
Bossy believes in immediate and comprehensive service, and she communicates this with a directness I respect even when I’m running on five hours of sleep.
I get her sorted, then Baldy, who wakes up blinking and affronted in the way of someone who had not planned to be conscious yet and would like the record to reflect this.
Boy wakes last, as usual—he opens his eyes, looks at the ceiling, looks at me, and waits to see what the morning has to offer before committing to any particular emotional response.
He is, I think, going to be a very measured person. His father’s child through and through.
I think about Ronan while I feed them in rotation, because apparently that is what I do now.
What he said last night, and the particular, unhedged way he said things.
No performance. No checking to see how it landed.
Just the truth, offered directly, and then the door closing quietly behind him and the sound of his car in the street.
I lie there replaying it with the slightly embarrassing focus of a person who is developing feelings and can’t fully stop themselves from examining the evidence.
Connor used to say nice things too. I want to be careful not to let that comparison flatten everything into the same shape, because the things Connor said and the things Ronan says are not the same things.
Connor’s compliments were always slightly about him—look at this interesting, perceptive thing I’ve noticed about you. Ronan’s are just observations. Plainly delivered. Like he’s reporting findings rather than performing.
I am not going to be reckless about this. I have three brand-new humans who need me to make good decisions, and my history with men is not, objectively, a strong foundation for confidence.
But I’m also not going to spend the next several months pretending I don’t feel what I feel, because pretending has never done me any good and I’m too tired for it besides.
I tried pretending for the better part of a year with Connor—pretending things were fine, pretending I didn’t notice the drinking, pretending I wasn’t slowly becoming a smaller version of myself—and it got me nowhere except Galway in March, getting dumped.
I am done with pretending.
I’ve just gotten all three back down—a minor miracle of coordination that I’m not going to examine too closely in case examining it breaks the spell—when someone pounds on my front door.
Not knocks. Pounds.
Connor is on my front step in last night’s clothes. He hasn’t slept. He has the look of a man who has spent the dark hours building a case and is here to present oral arguments.
“Paternity doesn’t matter,” he says, before I’ve fully opened the door. He has clearly been practicing this. “I want you back regardless. Biology isn’t the only thing that makes a family.”
I look at him for a moment. There’s something genuinely sad about this—how close he is to an insight that could actually serve him, aimed squarely at the wrong target. He’s not wrong about biology. He’s just wrong about everything else.
“You’re right. Biology isn’t everything.
But Connor, I don’t want you back. That’s not about the babies or the test or any of the past week.
You ended things in Galway, and I was sad for about forty-eight hours, and then I was relieved.
I was relieved, and that told me everything I needed to know about where we actually were. ”
He flinches. I don’t look away from it. He says, “You’re choosing him.”
“I’m choosing me.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit—this is about my father—”
“This is about me telling you clearly that I don’t want to be with you.
I’m not a fallback plan, Connor. I’m not a reason to grow up.
You need to find what you’re looking for in yourself.
A wife and babies shouldn’t be the thing that does that for you.
That’s not fair to the wife or the babies, and honestly, it’s not fair to you. ”
He’s quiet. Bossy makes a sound from the bedroom that is not yet a complaint but is the announcement that a complaint is being drafted. Connor looks toward the sound, and something moves across his face. Not anger exactly. I’m not sure what it is.
“Fine. This is the last time you’ll ever see me.”
“I think that’s probably for the best.”
He nods once, sharp and final, and walks back down my front path.
I watch him go with the particular mixed feeling of watching someone you once genuinely cared about choose pain over sense and knowing there is nothing you can do to change it.
The sad part is that I do still care about him.
Not romantically, but in the way you care about a person who needs more help than they’d accept and who you quietly hope finds their way to it eventually.
I hope he does. I mean that.
But I’m also standing here in my doorway in the cold, aware that the weight I’ve been carrying since the day he dumped me in that airport is finally, completely gone. Not just lighter. Gone.
I close the door and lean against it. Just as I start to breathe, Bossy makes her opinion of this known at volume. I go and get her.
Leigh arrives a while later with bagels and the careful expression of a woman who has been watching from her window. She sets everything on the counter and turns and looks at me with the assessment of someone checking whether a structure survived a storm. “You all right?”
“Yeah, I actually am.”
She studies me for a moment. “He’s not coming back this time, is he?”
“No. I think he means it.”
A pause. “Is that what you want?”
“So very, very much.”
Leigh nods. She doesn’t look entirely convinced—she has always rooted for Connor more than I thought was warranted, and I’ve never fully understood why—but she accepts the answer, which is what I need.
She hands me half a bagel and goes to check on the babies, lifting Baldy out of her crib with the reverent, slightly dazed expression she gets every time, like she still can’t believe they’re real.
“She has no hair,” she says, for approximately the fifteenth time since they were born. “Like, none at all.”
“Hence the nickname.”
“She’s perfect.”
“She is,” I agree. “They all are. Now tell me if you want cream cheese because I’m not sharing mine.”
Leigh laughs, and I laugh, and Baldy looks between us with the serene indifference of someone who has not yet developed opinions about cream cheese, and the morning settles into something easy and ordinary that feels, after the past ten days, like a minor gift.
Bossy has moved on from her protest and is in her crib conducting what appears to be a thorough audit of the ceiling—she does this for long stretches, staring upward with intense concentration, occasionally delivering commentary in her not-quite-crying sound.
Boy is in his crib doing what Boy does, which is lie quietly and think.
I genuinely believe he is thinking. There’s something behind his eyes—not the unfocused blur of a newborn but not yet a coherent thought, something in between, patient and interior.
Ronan has the same quality. That gathering-before-speaking thing, the sense of someone who is always slightly behind their own eyes, considering.
I find it restful rather than unnerving. I find almost everything about Ronan restful rather than unnerving, which is a sentence I could not have imagined saying about anyone six months ago and which I am choosing not to examine too closely today.
Leigh is full of questions today. “When was it that Connor cheated on you again?”
“About six months before we broke up. That I know of.” I shrug.
“Why’d you stay?”
“He’s human. Humans make mistakes. Not that he ever really apologized for it… but I could tell he was sorry. Or he performed sorry well enough that it counted. I dunno. I’m not sure how invested I was in the whole thing in the first place. But anyway, people make mistakes, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Besides, it was just the one time… I can forgive one time, you know?”
Her brow lines. “I suppose so. I hate to talk about heavy shit and run, but I have a contract I have to work on—”
“Thanks for the bagels and the chat. Don’t let me stop you from getting paid, girl.”
She half smiles and leaves, and I spend the rest of the day in the particular pleasant rhythm that I’m starting to think of as my actual life now—the rotation of feeding and changing and walking and the brief windows in between where I do something for myself.
Currently, that means checking my online training metrics, answering emails, filming fifteen-minute low-impact workout videos in my sitting room while the babies watch from their cribs with varying degrees of interest.
Bossy has opinions about my cool-down stretches. Boy watches the whole thing from start to finish without moving. Baldy falls asleep during the warm-up and stays that way for forty minutes.
My online numbers are good. Better than good, honestly—the pregnancy content drew a following I didn’t expect, and the pivot to gentle postpartum workouts has kept them. My actual life, the one I was so afraid of nine months ago, is turning out to be something I didn’t know I was building toward.
Building toward something makes me think about Ronan, and I’m texting him before I can stop myself. Connor came by. Says it’s the last time. I think he means it.
He replies in under two minutes. How are you feeling about that?
Like myself, I type back. Which is the best I’ve felt in a while.
Glad to hear it.
I put the phone down, and I’m smiling at the ceiling, which is becoming a habit, and I think that of all the unexpected developments in my life over the past nine months, this particular one might be my favorite.