Chapter 28 Ronan
RONAN
Mary calls on a Wednesday afternoon while I’m doing something I have not done in years, which is sitting in my own home in the middle of the day doing nothing in particular.
Boy is asleep on my chest. Sage is in the study taking a client call.
The girls are in their cribs, Bossy conserving energy for her next campaign and Baldy communing with whatever interior landscape she finds so endlessly interesting.
One day, we’ll give them proper names. We’re still mulling them over. As Sage says, it’s an important decision that shouldn’t be made lightly. She says this because she and her sister hate their names. I think they’re lovely, but I didn’t have to grow up with them.
I answer Mary’s call quietly, shifting Boy slightly so he doesn’t wake.
“Ronan.” Mary’s voice has the particular energy it gets when she’s about to tell me something she finds either delightful or disastrous.
Over the years of siblinghood, I have learned to distinguish between the two.
This is, I think, delightful, but with a complication underneath it.
“I’ve been putting together the parade archive for the website. Last year’s photos.”
“Right.” Her annual project for the city.
“I’ve got a lovely set from the crowd celebration. Very good turnout this year.” A pause. “As it turns out, Connor’s in several of them.”
I’m quiet for a moment. Connor told me he couldn’t make the Galway celebration last year.
Used his girlfriend at the time—Sage—as an excuse.
I had accepted it with the ease of a man who has learned not to push Connor on these things, which is to say I had accepted it with the ease of a man who has been making excuses for his own absence for so long that he’s extended the same courtesy to his son.
“Oh?”
“He is. Quite prominently in a few of them.” Another pause, more deliberate. “With a woman I don’t recognize.”
I sit with that for a moment. Boy shifts on my chest and resettles without waking, and I run a hand down his back automatically, the way I have learned to do this. No time like the present to clear some things up. “On that subject,” I say carefully, “the brunette in the photos with Connor—”
“Hmm?”
“She’s now my girlfriend. Currently. She’s moved in.”
A silence that is, even by Mary’s standards, extremely loaded. “She’s… Ronan. The woman in the photos with Connor—”
“His ex-girlfriend now, yes. It’s a longer story than a phone call can hold. The short version is that they had just broken up, she and I met before I knew who she was to him, and there are now three babies in my sitting room.”
“Three—”
“Triplets. Two girls and a boy.”
Another silence. I can hear Mary processing this with the particular, industrious quality she brings to unexpected information. Not shocked exactly, but recalibrating, fitting the new shape of things into the existing architecture of her understanding of my life.
“Right,” she says finally. “That is a longer story. How is it you keep ending up with surprise babies?”
I laugh hard enough to disturb Boy, but he settles back down fast. “Good sperm, I suppose.”
“Forget I asked. And Connor, he knows? About you and this woman?”
“He does. We’ve talked. It’s been difficult, and it’s ongoing, but we’re in better shape than we were.” I pause. “He came to me. Voluntarily. That’s new.”
“I’m glad,” Mary says, simply and warmly, the way she says things she means without ceremony. “I want to hear all of it when there’s time. But Ronan, about these photos—”
“Send them.”
“I’m sending them now.”
My phone buzzes against my ear. I pull it away and look at the images she’s sent, holding Boy against my shoulder with the other arm in the way that has become entirely automatic in the past seven weeks.
Quietly, she says, “That’s not a brunette in the pictures.”
I scan them quickly, searching for Connor.
The photographs are bright and crowded, the particular chaos of the Galway parade.
Green everything, the street full of people, the familiar landmarks of the city I grew up in and left and still dream about with a frequency I don’t always admit.
And there, in the third photograph, unmistakably, standing in the crowd with a pint of Guinness and the easy, unselfconscious grin he only gets in Galway, is Connor.
With a woman beside him. Blond hair in braids, brown eyes, laughing at something, his arm around her shoulders.
Leigh.
I look at the photograph for a long moment.
I think about Sage telling me that Leigh had confessed to months of phone calls and to a connection she hadn’t known how to tell Sage about.
The closeness Leigh had with Sage throughout the pregnancy.
The terrible position she’d been in and the imperfect way she’d navigated it.
I am angry on Sage’s behalf.
Sage needs to see the picture. She deserves the full picture, not the edited version Leigh chose to offer.
And she is going to be hurt by it, and I cannot prevent that, and I am going to have to be the one to show her, and I am going to do it tonight rather than waiting.
There is no amount of time that will make this land better for her.
“I want you to be honest with me. Whatever else happens. I have had enough of people not being honest with me.” Sage said it plainly and she meant it, and I gave her my word, and my word is not contingent on the information being convenient.
I can do this. I have been doing this for thirty years. The difference is that those were strangers, and this is the woman who has her feet tucked under her on my sofa when she reads, who sings to the babies when she thinks I cannot hear. She deserves the full truth.
“Mary,” I say.
“Yes?”
“When are you putting the archive up?”
“End of the month. It’s not urgent.”
We talk for another few minutes about the business and Liam, who has been making noise about expanding the labs into a new territory and wants a family vote. There’s the spring work that the estate in Galway needs doing. Am I planning to come for Saint Patrick’s Day this year?
I tell her yes. I tell her I’ll be bringing my family. She makes a sound that tells me she is holding a very large smile in check.
Mary is quiet for a moment. “Ronan. Are you in love with her?”
“Madly.” The word comes out without effort.
“Good. It’s about time.”
We say goodbye, and Boy opens his eyes when I put the phone down, as though he was waiting for me to be done. He looks at me with his usual evaluating patience.
“Nothing to worry about,” I tell him. “I’m handling it.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. Then he closes his eyes again, satisfied.
I wish I found it as easy to take my own word for things.
I sit for a while longer with Boy and the question and the photograph on my phone and the conversation I’m going to need to have with Sage this evening.
Outside, the sky is doing something particular.
It’s that low, amber late-winter light that comes through the windows at this time of day and fills the room with a quality of warmth that I have started to associate with this specific life, this specific hour, this place I have found my way to.
I am in love with her. I have been for a while. I have been circling around the word the way I circle around any significant diagnosis, making sure of the finding before I commit to it, running the secondary tests, and satisfying myself that what I’m seeing is what I think I’m seeing.
I am satisfied.
Tonight I will show her a photograph that is going to hurt her, because I promised to be honest and I intend to keep that promise. Tomorrow, or the day after, when the hurt has found its shape and she has worked through the first part of it, I am going to tell her that I love her.
One does not balance the other, and I would not pretend it could. But I hope she finds some solace in knowing she is loved. Madly.