Chapter 31 Sage
SAGE
“I’m sorry.”
Before coffee, before the babies, before anything else, he comes into the kitchen while I’m standing at the counter in his shirt, staring at the sink. I peep over at him and see the earnest look on his handsome face. “What?”
“I made what you were feeling about me last night because I had a moment of insecurity, and that’s mine to manage, not yours. That was wrong of me. I’m sorry.” He says it plainly, no over-explanation. No games.
I slept badly, and the Leigh situation is still sitting in me like a stone, and I have not had coffee yet, and Ronan is standing in the kitchen in his scrubs, holding his mug and looking at me with his steady, direct gaze.
He looks so organized and neat that I feel like a pile of crap in front of him. I know he doesn’t mean to insult me by looking so together right now, but it feels like an attack all the same. How dare he.
Yes, I know I’m being crazy. I don’t much care. So, I shrug. “Okay.”
“Okay, you accept it, or okay, you heard me?”
“Both.” I turn back to the sink. “I know why it happened, Ronan. I understand the fear underneath it. I just needed you to not aim it at me.”
“I know,” he says. “I won’t. Not ever again.” He means it, the same way he always means everything. All the way through, no hedging.
It’s a comfort, but at the same time, it leaves no room for flexibility.
What if he goes back on his word? Will he feel like he betrayed himself or me? What if he never goes back on his word? He never has before with me. Why would he start now?
What if, one day, he comes to me, wanting a throuple, and I’m the one who isn’t ready for it?
I’ve been cheated on in the past, not only by Connor. I’ve been lied to by friends, though not at this scale. Each time, it left me feeling unsteady or like I wasn’t enough.
This is the colossal version of that feeling. Something that is trying to swallow me whole. I’m not sure how to not let it, and right now, I’m smelling betrayal everywhere.
Even just the potential for it from Ronan is enough to set me on edge. He’s never given me a reason to doubt him, but Leigh has given me a reason to doubt everyone and everything. I don’t want to. But I don’t know how to stop.
So, I make coffee and hand him one, and we stand at the counter and drink our coffee in the morning quiet, and that’s it. Done. We simply move on, together, into the day.
It feels very grown-up to have a fight and to let it go.
Except, I don’t know if I can. At least, not on the inside.
I think about that, later, when the babies are down for their morning nap, and I’m sitting at the desk in the study looking at the thing that’s been in the back of my mind lately. But my thoughts aren’t on the college curriculum page.
It’s the thing I didn’t have before. Not the absence of conflict, because conflict is inevitable and I’ve always known that, but this. The ability to have the difficult moment and then move through it cleanly, without residue, without the next three days spent managing the fallout.
Connor and I had conflict like sediment. It accumulated. By the end, we were wading through it and couldn’t remember the original shape of the floor. I’d lost track of the reasons we were together long before we broke up.
I’m not sure what it means for Ronan and me. We have big differences between us, and this is only the first time one has been brought up at the wrong time. The age thing, obviously. But there are others. The wealth gap, for instance.
His legacy dwarfs mine, and his daughters… I adore Myrna and Orla, but they’re so accomplished compared to me. His family founded and owns Callahan Labs.
The legacy thing might be the biggest one of all, because it’s the most flexible.
I can’t change our ages, and I wouldn’t want to.
The wealth thing—he was born into it, on top of making his own money, because that’s how it grows.
You start with a pile of cash and keep growing it.
I was not born with a pile of cash, so it’s hard to grow something from nothing.
But a legacy is based on your accomplishments, and that I can change. If I try. But if I try, will that upset the apple cart? Will Ronan be put off by it, or will he be glad that I’m trying to improve myself?
Do I want to be with someone who doesn’t want me to improve?
It all adds up to a situation that I don’t know we can navigate. Definitely not like this, if we’re going to get into fights all willy-nilly.
I need a change, or I might disappear into his world completely. But who am I, if not just his girlfriend or a mom of three brilliant babies? Who am I outside of this penthouse?
Who I’ve always been. A trainer.
A trainer with half a degree, my inner voice reminds me. That voice has been getting louder lately, and it’s time to pay attention.
I open the university portal, look at the physical education degree requirements, and I feel, for the first time since I left, like I’m not doing this to prove anything to anyone.
Not to Ronan, not to my mother, not to myself in the defensive way of someone who needs the credential to feel legitimate.
I want to finish it because I started it, and I want to be a person who finishes things.
The class list is grueling. Exercise physiology, sports nutrition, biomechanics, and curriculum design.
I know most of this material already from years of working in it, which means the degree will be challenging in the way of things that require rigor rather than discovery, and I find I want that.
I want to do the rigorous thing. I want to sit exams and write papers and do it properly, not because anyone requires me to, but because I require it of myself.
My mother required very little of herself.
She coasted, in the years after my father left, on the minimum necessary to maintain the appearance of a functional household.
I understood this intellectually for a long time before I understood it in my body.
The specific, cellular wariness of a person who grew up in a house where effort was optional.
I have been fighting that wariness my whole adult life, not because I am afraid of becoming her but because I am aware that the path of least resistance has a particular pull when you are tired, and I have been very tired this year.
I am also present. Consistent. Awake to my own life in a way I have not always been.
And finishing the degree is part of that.
Part of the ongoing project of being someone who does what she said she would do.
Ronan is right—I’m not my mom, and I never will be.
I require more of myself than she ever did.
He did a half shift today, so he’s back now, and we need to have this conversation.
He’s in the nursery with Boy, who is awake and conducting his usual surveillance of the room from his crib, and Ronan is sitting in the feeding chair beside him, reading something on his phone, close enough that Boy can see him but not hovering, just present. Available.
“I want to re-enroll in my physical education degree,” I say from the doorway.
He looks up. His face is unreadable.
“I want to finish it. Not for the babies, not for the business. For me. Because I started it and I want to have done it.”
“Whatever for?”
“I just… were you not listening? I just said why.”
His jaw tightens. “I only meant there’s no need for you to work, Sage. So, I don’t see the point of pursuing a degree you don’t need.”
“Our kids deserve to have an educated mother.”
“They have a well-educated father. That’s plenty. I can fill in the gaps for you.”
“It’s not just for them. It’s for me too. Didn’t you hear that part?”
Ronan exhales loudly out of his nose and sets Boy back in his crib. He turns to me and motions for us to leave the nursery, so we do. Once he closes the door, he quietly says, “If you’re going to leave me, just do it.”