Chapter 29 Sage
SAGE
Ronan has been quieter than usual since he got off the phone with his sister Mary this afternoon. Not cold or distant, just contained in the specific way of a man carrying something he is about to put down.
He will tell me in his own time, but I am dying to know what’s eating him.
When he comes to me in the office, he actually looks nervous. Which is throwing me off. I don’t know this side of Ronan.
“Hey. Everything okay?” Stupid question. I know it’s not. That much is obvious.
“Mary sent this,” he says as he sets his phone in front of me. “It’s from last year’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in Galway. I wanted you to see it before it goes into the public archive.”
The photograph is bright and crowded and completely clear. Nearly centered is Connor, grinning, relaxed. Not a care in the world and looking more like the man I met than the drunken jerk he’s become.
His arm around Leigh.
Leigh in the crowd, laughing, Guinness in hand, leaning into him like she belongs there, her long blond braids over his arm. Cozy. Happy.
This photograph is from last March. I was with Connor in March. We were still together in March. Barely, thinning at the edges, but together officially.
Until he dumped me.
The math links together in my head in pieces. Connor’s business trips. His family trips. The family I never met.
Leigh’s business trips. They were the only reason she ever left home. They kept popping up at the same time as Connor’s trips, which we laughed at as a coincidence at the time.
I never thought anything of the timing. Chalked it up to fate or cosmic coincidence. Never suspected a thing. Especially not after he cheated on me, and Leigh was fiercely upset.
Because I had nearly figured it out.
I’d found a long blond hair in his bed and called him out on it, and he didn’t deny cheating on me. He owned up to it straightaway, apologized, and asked for forgiveness, saying we had something special. I agreed after a few days of ranting to Leigh…
I put Ronan’s phone down on the table and look at it. Ronan is watching me with the steady, present attention of a man who has delivered difficult news before and knows that the most useful thing he can do right now is simply be here.
“How long have you known?”
“About an hour.”
I nod. I stand up. I get my coat from the hook by the door. “Send me the picture.”
“Sage—”
“I need to talk to her. I’ll be back.” I pause. “You’re all right with the babies?”
“Of course.” He stands and sends the pic. “Do you want me to come?”
“No.” I look at him. “I need to do this on my own.”
He reads my face and nods, and I go.
The drive to Leigh’s cottage takes less time than expected, and I use none of it to cool down, which probably means I arrive at her door in a state that is not entirely conducive to a measured conversation. I knock.
Well, I bang. Full fist. A lot.
She opens it almost immediately, in her sweats, and the smile she starts drops when she sees my face. “Sage—”
“Did you have a good time in Ireland?”
She turns paper white. Her mouth opens and closes for a moment.
I hold up my phone with the photograph on the screen. “You were in Galway. On Saint Patrick’s Day. With Connor. While he and I were still together.”
She looks at the photo. Then at me. Her voice is hoarse. “Yes.”
“You were there, at the parade. The one Connor acted too high and mighty to really get into with me. But you two were having a great time, according to the picture.”
She doesn’t speak, not at first. She gulps instead. “I know.”
“You knew I was there. Knew that I thought he was going to propose. Knew that I was excited to meet his family.”
She only nods. Guilt makes her face long in a strange way, like her jaw is going slack behind closed lips.
I have been angry at Leigh before. The hospital, the months of hidden phone calls.
In both of those instances, I found my way to the complicated truth underneath the anger, the full picture of a person who loved me imperfectly and was trying, in the wrong direction, to do right by everyone simultaneously.
I found my way to that and chose to work on our friendship.
For a while, that worked. Until now.
We overlapped in Connor’s dating history. This is specific and dated, and there will be a photograph of it in a public archive.
I’m shaking, but my voice is steady, surprisingly. “I want to understand. Walk me through it. When did it start.”
“A few months after you two started dating.”
“And you just… thought you’d help yourself to my boyfriend, while you played me like an idiot.”
“No,” she says, too fast. “We tried to keep it from becoming anything—”
“How did you even meet back then? I wasn’t introducing him to anyone that soon.”
“I ran into him outside your cottage, and it clicked who he was. We started talking… and things just… escalated.”
“And you two have been together ever since?”
She shakes her head, braids smacking around her shoulders. “We’ve been on-again, off-again most of the time.”
“So while I was two miles away thinking I was on a romantic trip and about to be proposed to, you were there together.”
“Yeah.”
“And when I came home sad and you sat on my sofa and held my hand while I talked about the breakup, you knew. Everything. Start to finish.”
She nods.
“When I found out I was pregnant and you built me two websites and brought me toast and sat on my bathroom floor at two in the morning, you kept that giant secret from me.”
“I did.”
I stand in her sitting room and let the full, considerable weight of a year of that settle on me. “Why didn’t you tell me?” It comes out very flat. I think I’m running out of emotions at this point. “Why didn’t you tell me after? When it was over, or between times with him, whatever you call it.”
“Because you were—” She stops. “Because you came home and you were sad and then you found out you were pregnant and everything was so much at once, and I told myself it was over and it didn’t matter and telling you would only hurt you for no reason, and you were already going through so much—”
“And you thought you were doing me a favor by holding it inside?”
She gulps again. “I thought… I fucked up, Sage. I thought holding that secret, letting it eat at me, was the price I had to pay. I could bear that for you, to keep you from suffering more.”
I am shaking so hard that I might vibrate into a new dimension. My voice doesn’t sound like me. “That was not your call to make.”
“I know.”
“That has never been your call to make. Not once. Not the hospital, not this.” I am still very calm and it is a very specific kind of calm, the kind that comes when you are past the anger and into something colder and more permanent.
“You have been making calls on my behalf for over a year, Leigh. You have been deciding what I know and when I know it and what I can handle, and you have been wrong every single time.”
She doesn’t argue. She looks at me with the expression of someone who knows they have run out of runway.
Like our friendship.
I am aware, standing here, of how many times I have found my way to the complicated full picture of Leigh and chosen generosity.
The hospital. The alleged friendship between her and Connor.
Every time, I found the version of her that was trying, and I let that count for something.
I don’t regret any of those calls. They were right, at the time, with the information I had.
This is different. “I can’t trust you, Leigh. I’ve been trying to find my way back to trusting you, and I keep finding more things. I can’t build on this.”
“Sage—”
“I’m not making any choices in anger, because I don’t make permanent decisions when I’m this upset. But I need you to know where I am.” I put my phone back in my pocket. “This is not… I don’t… I can’t…”
I don’t even want to look at her face right now. I’m disgusted. Furious. It’s not even about Connor. It’s seeing what I thought we had and finding holes in every direction.
Her voice is so fragile now. “I didn’t want to hurt you, Sage.”
Something like a laugh and gasp comes out of me. “Is that right?”
“Of course. Hurting you was the last thing on my mind—”
“No shit. Your mind was stuck on Connor’s dick.”
“That’s not fair—”
“Do you think I give a flying fuck about fair right now, Leigh?”
She wisely clams up.
“I know I said I don’t make decisions based on anger, but I can’t stand the sight of you right now—”
“I thought you said you were over Connor.” She hugs herself.
“This isn’t about him!” I bark. “This is about you and me and the friendship I thought we had! Friends don’t do this to each other!”
She moves suddenly, reaching for my hands with both of hers. A tear tracks down her face. “I know. I know friends don’t do this… Sage…” Her deep breaths steady themselves, as she stares me in the eye. “I’ve never wanted to be just friends.”
“Well, congratulations. I hope you and Connor live a long and miserable life together.”
“I never wanted to be just friends with you, Sage. You… and Connor.”
The words are words I know, but they don’t make sense. “What was that?”
She closes her eyes and sighs, as if this has been on her mind forever. “When you moved here, I knew that you were the one for me. But then I met Connor, and he was already yours, and I thought, what if there were two for me? What if—what if we could be a throuple?”
“I’m not—”
“There was that night we got hammered on schnapps, and you don’t drink that often, so I thought that since you were making an exception that I was… exceptional to you. And then you told me about that threeway you had in college with that guy and the cheerleader girl—”
“That was one time!”
Leigh slowly nods. “And what if you could have that every night, Sage? With people you care about?”
I jerk my hands from hers when I realize she’s still holding them. “You are out of your mind.”
“I’m not crazy. Just greedy.” She shrugs, as if that makes any of this better.
“You’re no better than every guy who pretends to be your friend to get in your pants—no wait. You’re worse, actually.”
“Don’t say that—”
“You are. You thought you could wedge your way into my relationship with Connor and use that to get me too. You lied to me for over a year. Cheated on me worse than Connor ever did—”
“But he was cheating with me, so how is that worse?”
I don’t understand how she doesn’t see it. “Because he was just a boyfriend, Leigh. You were supposed to be my person.”
“I can be your person again.” She steps closer and reaches for me. “If you’ll just let—”
I take a giant step back. “You’re not my person. You never were. You tried to leverage our friendship into getting what you wanted from me. It was all lies, right from the start.”
“The best relationships start with friendship—”
“And friendship isn’t built on lies!” I’m shouting. I don’t mean to, but I am. “I will never trust you again!” I bolt for the door. There’s nothing more to say to her.
My chest feels like it wants to cave in. My head’s spinning. I shouldn’t drive, and I know it, but I need to feel in control of something, so I do. But I force myself to go slowly, pay too much attention to the traffic lights.
Why does a friendship breakup hurt worse than the regular kind?
Maybe I was never really invested in the men I dated. I didn’t care, so it didn’t hurt that bad. It never hurt like this.
The trust we had, the lies she told. They keep replaying in my mind on a loop. How many lies? How many times had they laughed behind my back? Or was it guilt-ridden? Were they bragging about it someplace?
Was I just a joke to both of them?
Part of me wants to ask, but that would mean talking to them, and fuck that. I can’t… How am I supposed to get past this?
When I get home, Ronan is there with a bottle of the good stuff, two open arms, and three sleeping babies, he assures me. And I break down. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop.