Chapter 18 - Willow
WILLOW
On bed rest, days stretch thin. The ceiling is a field I’ve memorized.
The clock is a cheap metronome. I move from couch to chair and back again, from plain crackers to ginger tea to vanilla yogurt, and tell myself variety is the spice of life.
My phone buzzes with check-ins. Cheyenne.
Dylan. Dr. Patel’s nurse. And, like clockwork, the men.
Sean arrives first, letting himself in and filling the doorway of my bedroom with a grin, a grocery bag looped over each arm. “Emergency provisions,” he announces. “Also, I brought a plant. Do you like that kind of thing?”
“What kind of plant?” I ask suspiciously from the couch.
“Green,” he says seriously, and reveals the saddest plant you’ve ever seen. It’s wiry and brave and starving in a tiny pot, its leaves turned toward the ground.
“It’s perfect,” I say, and he brightens like I mean it (I do) and sets it by the window, finagling the blinds to lay the light just right on the struggling leaves.
He starts stage-managing my living room within minutes—water within reach, pillow under knees, another behind my back, a blanket he pretends is a cape. He makes bad jokes on purpose so I’ll groan and then laugh. It works. It always works.
He folds and refolds the tiny clothes Cheyenne washed because he says the onesies have to be “department-store neat or the babies will judge, sure.” He hands me a little hat, smaller than my palm, with bear ears.
“Tell me that’s not a felony, God love it,” he says softly.
The joke is there, but the softness is louder.
I look at the hat and my throat tightens. “It’s evidence, all right.” He sets it to the side, clearing his throat, his face looking pinched.
Declan’s knock is a courtesy, as he’s already trailing in, hands gripping the handles of paint cans and loose papers shoved under his arms. His eyes flick over the house automatically, nodding at Sean folding onesies on my bed, the arms touching my legs like I’m furniture.
I want to be annoyed by Declan and his ritual, his anxieties, except that I find it… soothing.
He looks into the nursery and stands there a long beat, forearm against the doorjamb like he’s holding the world at bay.
“It’s not finished,” I say from the bed, unnecessarily.
He turns his head, profile sharp, red hair bouncing. I have an urge to run my hand through it. I gesture for him to come closer to me, and he sets down the cans before he acquiesces. “It’s getting there, sure,” he says warmly, eyes on the clothes that Sean is folding.
I push the blanket off my legs and move to sit up, but Declan and Sean both surge forward like a wave in the ocean. Declan’s hand finds my chest, and Sean’s are on my shoulders. The blanket is over my body before I’m even sure what’s happened.
“I can take care of myself,” I tell them, my eyes on Declan, and he gives me a mild look back.
“You can,” he says. “And I can help. Both things can be true.”
I lean my head back against the pillow and study him. “That your love language? Assistance?”
He goes still for a fraction, something unreadable moving through his eyes like heat-shimmer over asphalt. Then: “It’s one of them.”
Sighing, I relent, asking, “What’s under your arm?”
“Ah, this.” He chuckles, pulling the pieces of paper out from under his arm. “These are some sketches Rowan did—ideas for the nursery mural.”
“Nursery mural?”
“Oh, you have to have a mural,” he tells me like it’s obvious.
He moves through the space like a man in a house he knows intimately and respects.
He doesn’t hover and somehow still hovers.
He adjusts the angle of the fan. He pulls the throw rug back into alignment so I won’t trip when I get up to pee for the thousandth time.
“Of course the baby needs a mural. All babies need murals,” Sean agrees with a wink.
Cheyenne appears in the doorway with Rowan, holding a section of his button-up with two fingers like he’s infected. “I found this one outside looking lost. I asked him if he’d like to come in, and he seemed agreeable.”
Rowan offers me a thin smile. The crown of curls at his forehead is wilder than usual. There’s a smudge on his wrist like he’s written something there and scrubbed it off.
“Hi,” I say carefully.
“Hi,” he echoes, as if the word is in a language he’s rusty in.
“Willow,” Cheyenne says sharply, “can you come help me in the kitchen?”
All three of the men look at her with gawking expressions, and she rolls her eyes. “I won’t put her to work, guys, I just wanted to ask her about…lunch.”
The men’s arms are under me, lifting me like I’m crowd-surfing at a concert. Once I’m standing, I feel weightless. Laughing, Cheyenne wraps her arm around my waist and mutters, “Okay, let’s go,” like we’re in a hostage situation and she’s breaking me free.
She stands at the sink with her sleeves shoved to her elbows, rinsing a mug that already looks clean. “You do realize,” she says, without turning, “that all three of them are in love with you.”
The word hits like the smallest stone in water—plink—then ripples run to all the edges. My fingers fumble my mug and squeak against the handle, so I steady it with two hands. One of my feet start that anxious heel-rock under the table that I haven’t noticed since college.
I open my mouth and shut it again. “That’s…dramatic.”
A small laugh coughs out of her. “Dramatic? That’s the word you want to use?”
“They’re…we’re…it’s not like that,” I say, but it feels like a lie when I say it. She’s right, and she figured it out before I did, which is embarrassing because it’s my life, my living room, and my pulse that keeps changing tempo depending on whose shadow crosses the threshold.
Heat creeps up my cheeks, and I focus on the wood grain of my kitchen table, trying to keep her from seeing.
It is like that. It’s been like that with all of them at one point, but I’ve been pushing it away.
It’s too complicated, it being like that.
I don’t even know who the father of my triplets is.
Cheyenne flicks water from her fingers into the sink, then whirls around to face me. “Sean cooks and folds laundry like he’s auditioning for a domestic partnership. Declan’s been putting your nursery together like you might let him sleep in the crib. And Rowan—”
I wait for it to come, but it doesn’t. When I look up at her, her mouth softens mercifully. “Rowan what?” I ask gently.
“Rowan comes over to play pretend with you like he doesn’t want you and you don’t want him. But he likes reading to you and when you fall asleep, he keeps reading.”
I inhale sharply, like she’s just hit me. “I don’t—” I swallow hard and look up at the ceiling. “Cheyenne, I can’t do—anything—”
Cheyenne wipes her hands on a dish towel with exaggerated patience.
“You can’t keep pretending this is just friendly care forever, Willow.
Not even with yourself.” She walks over to me and leans forward over the dining table, her forearms touching the splintered wood.
“The house is starting to vibrate with all this tension.”
I look around like I could locate the vibration in the walls. The couch, the blanket with pills like tiny moons, the stack of baby clothes Sean folded into a tower, the paint cans leaning against the nursery wall with some sketch ideas like a promise we haven’t assembled. It hums. I hum.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” I whisper.
She smiles sadly at me and grabs her purse.
“Stop pretending you don’t feel it.” She nods toward the door.
“I’m gonna sneak out and get some dinner with Dylan.
I think you’re in good hands here, hm?” She kisses my temple and smooths my hair, smiling at me in a way that only a best friend can. “You can do it. Be brave.”
The men slowly peter back into the living room once they realize that I’m not coming back into the bedroom.
We talk about nothing until the nothing fills the room.
Sean’s neighbor who grills at odd hours—“grand if you like smoke in your curtains”—a dean at MUSC who misuses the word “quantum,” a surfer at Folly who wore jeans and socks in the water.
The hum sharpens into something almost audible, and it feels like we’ve all come to a cliff we didn’t admit we were walking toward.
Cheyenne’s sentence flickers in the back of my mind like a neon sign. All three of them are in love with you. My palms are damp. I rub them on my pajama pants, which I seem to live in these days, and say something true to cut the static. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I stand up like just the standing is making a statement. Three pairs of eyes find me. Three different storms.
“Course you are, love,” Sean says lightly from his seat across from me at the table, but the lightness is threaded with steel. Declan nods, and Rowan blinks, and I can see the bobbing of their throats as they swallow.
I step toward Sean and kiss him. It isn’t sloppy or passion, but it isn’t a joke either.
It’s warm and sure, a press at the edge of my mouth that feels like a door that’s been waiting to open.
He kisses me back, soft at first, then deeper when my hand brackets his jaw.
He tilts his head like I’m the right answer, and when my heart is in my throat, I pull back.
The hum in the room spikes. I glance over at Declan on the couch and Rowan in the chair, their eyes sharp and their necks flushed, and I make a split-second decision to approach Declan first. His mouth is a hard line, and he half shakes his head, a soft no, a warning to himself.