Chapter 30 Ronan
RONAN
After she gathers herself together, Sage tells me the highlights of her breakup with Leigh. That’s what she calls it. Not sure it qualifies, but who am I to judge?
She’s standing at the kitchen table with her coat still on, and she is very controlled about it now, which is its own kind of telling. Sage in full feeling is warm and direct and present. But now, her tone is flat, her edges are sharp.
I have seen this once before, when she talked about her mother, and I know enough to know this is not the absence of pain. This is pain being handled with both hands, and if she doesn’t let it out more, it will eat at her.
But I don’t push. I pour whiskey she doesn’t drink. I sit across from her while she looks at the table and works through whatever she’s working through, and I stay available without making myself an obstacle.
After a while, she adds, “She mentioned something crazy, at one point. At least, I thought of it as crazy at the time, because for me, it came out of left field. For her… it’s been on her mind for a long time.”
“What’s that?”
“She said that her hope, before everything went sideways, was that we could all be together. Me, her, and Connor. The three of us. That someday it might become a throuple.”
I look at her. There must be dozens of questions on my face.
“That was apparently the plan. Eventually. I mean, Connor always had a set on him, but I’m pretty sure Leigh’s balls must be bigger for bringing that up when I was furious with her.
I wonder whether she thought that fury could turn into passion or something twisted like that.
Who knows? I mean, if things had been handled better, maybe eventually, but the way it stands, she’s out of her mind. ”
I sit with that. I’m fifty-two years old, and I have lived what I would describe as a varied life, and I am not, as a rule, easily unsettled. As a doctor, I have trained not to let unusual personal relationships flummox me—I keep a level head no matter the circumstances.
But something moves in me at this. Something that is not quite jealousy and not quite insecurity, but in that neighborhood, making itself known with more urgency than I would like.
She is twenty-six now. That is the thing I keep returning to, not as a fact about her but as a fact about time. About the years ahead of her, the people she will meet, the ways she will grow and change in directions I cannot predict.
I am fifty-two. I have done most of my growing. I am, more or less, the man I will be, and she’s still becoming whoever she is going to be, and those two things can coexist beautifully, or they can create a slow, irrecoverable drift, and I have no way of knowing which it will be.
I cannot make myself younger or make her older or collapse the gap between us, and I do not want to. It is part of what we are, part of what brought us together on that plane, part of the specific texture of this particular life. It is a good life, and I love it every day.
What I can do is show up. Be present. Be the man she chose and keep being him, every day, rather than spending the days anticipating the moment she might choose otherwise.
The age gap. Sage has never once made me feel diminished in any way, and I have tried to extend the same courtesy to myself.
But sitting here now, listening to her describe a plan that involved her ex-boyfriend—my son—and her (former?) best friend and herself, I am aware of her age and the way she moves through a world that contains so many options.
I am fifty-two, and the math of that is not always easy to look at directly.
“That’s—” I stop. Choose my words. “That’s not something you are interested in.”
“Obviously not. They built it on lies, and I’m not stupid. Even if I wasn’t with you, I wouldn’t walk into that situation.”
“But in the abstract,” I say. And then, because I apparently cannot stop from pushing the matter, “If it hadn’t been built on lies. If the circumstances had been different. Is that something you’d want?”
She looks at me. Something shifts in her expression. Not anger yet, but the approach of it. “What?”
“What I’m saying is that you’re half my age, and you could have any—”
“Stop.” Her voice is quiet and exact. “Stop right there.”
“I’m not trying to—”
“You are. You’re sitting here making the worst fight in my life about you. I came home to tell you about the single worst friendship betrayal I’ve ever experienced, and instead of letting me get through it, you’ve made it about whether I want to be in a throuple.”
I open my mouth. But I don’t have adequate words for the moment.
“I’m not asking you to be someone you’re not,” she says.
“I’m not asking you to be twenty-six or to pretend the age gap doesn’t exist or to stop having feelings about it.
You can have all the feelings about it you want.
But you don’t get to have them at me tonight.
” She pushes back from the table. “I’m too tired for this fight. I’m going to shower and go to bed.”
She gets up. She goes to the bathroom. The door closes.
I sit at the kitchen table and listen to the shower run. She came home carrying something heavy and real, and the first thing I did was reach for my own fear and hold it out between us.
Not to hurt her. But the effect is the same, regardless of the intention.
The years with Aoifa were different, yet so similar. The ways I made things about myself during our marriage. My work, my absences, the ten thousand small redirections away from her and toward whatever felt more manageable at the time.
I did not do those things to hurt her. The effect was the same.
I am not going to do this to Sage. Not this time. Not her. I may be old, but I can still learn from my past mistakes.
She was right. I was doing exactly what she said I was doing. I had a moment of insecurity—legitimate, perhaps, but mine to manage—and I pointed it at her, in the middle of her pain, at the worst possible moment.
Strange the emotions that roll in. Embarrassment. Shame. But also gratitude.
I have spent decades in a demanding career, and I believe myself, on the whole, to be a man of reasonable emotional intelligence.
I understand people and their responses to stress, fear, pain, and grief.
I know the mechanisms by which people protect themselves and the damage those mechanisms cause when aimed at the wrong target.
I understand all of this, and I did it anyway, because the fear got ahead of the understanding, and now she is in the shower and I am at the kitchen table and the distance between us tonight is a thing I created.
I am grateful to Sage for calling me out on my shit. If she hadn’t, I might not see it for what it is. Nonsense.
She’s young and beautiful, and even with three kids in tow, she could easily find a throuple or any other combination of people to be with. She chose me. It’s my job to make her want to keep choosing me, not to freak out at the first sign of trouble when she’s so clearly suffering.
Boy wakes up at eleven, and I go to him before he can wake the girls, lifting him in the dark and walking the slow circuit of the nursery while he grumbles himself back toward sleep. He smells of the specific clean warmth of a sleeping infant, and he is heavier than he was when they moved in.
I sit with my list of fears, and I walk, and I let the dark and the quiet do what they do. I am afraid of things that have not happened. I am in love with a woman who is here, who chose this, and who told me, without ambiguity, what she wants.
The fears are mine to carry, not hers to manage.
“I made a mistake,” I tell him, very quietly. “With your mother. I’m going to fix it.”
He makes a sound against my shoulder that I choose to interpret as: obviously. I walk him until he’s fully asleep, then set him back down.
Standing in the doorway, I take a moment to watch them. The three little lives which take up every space in my heart, save for those marked “Sage.”
When I get to the bedroom, she is asleep, or doing a convincing impression of it. I don’t disturb her. I lie in the dark and look at the ceiling and think about what I’m afraid of.
It’s not even whether she wants to be in a throuple. It’s me. My past failings, coming to haunt my present.
One marriage that I loved and damaged through inattention and a single, consequential act of weakness.
A son raised from a distance by mutual agreement that I am now trying to unmake.
My career has been the insulation I’ve consistently used against the harder work of being fully present in my own life.
These are the patterns I bring. The things I am afraid of repeating.
Then, there’s Sage. Young, fierce, direct, entirely herself. The woman who has done everything right, or right-adjacent, and still suffers the foolishness of others.
The evidence is entirely against me.
Sage chose me. She moved in. She has shown me, over months of daily proximity, who she is and what she wants, and what she wants is here. In this bed, in this life, with me.
Aoifa used to say I was a man who lived in the future more than the present.
She said it with affection, but she meant it as a correction, and she was right.
I was always three steps ahead, always anticipating, always managing toward the outcome I wanted rather than simply inhabiting the moment I was in.
It made me a very good doctor. It made me, at times, a less present husband and father than I should have been.
In the morning, I will apologize. And then I will do better.