I sit back down in the recliner and take in the quiet moment we’ve somehow earned. For once, the space between us doesn’t feel like competition. It feels like safety in numbers.
The triplets sigh in their sleep. Fiona, Magnolia, Aisling. Three small names that anchor us to something larger than rules or reason.
I think of vitals, risk factors, statistical odds and how none of them prepared me for the real math problem. But family isn’t a formula to be solved. So, I stop trying to measure it.
“Hey,” I speak up, “I forgot to say welcome home.”
Willow lets out a little laugh from the couch. “We’re home,” she croons. It’s her home, but the definition of ownership has become fluid. The way the definition ofwehas become fluid. Her eyes flutter closed. “We made it.”
Sean squeezes her closer. “Aye, we did.”
The babies are finally home. And so are we, whatever the definition is.
34
SEAN
I can handle crying.I’ve handled mass casualty drills, trauma calls, the occasional drunk singing “Danny Boy” into a bedpan, God help me. But this? This is surround-sound chaos in a twelve-by-twelve nursery. Fiona starts the symphony, high-pitched and furious. Magnolia follows, indignant. It comes crackling through the baby monitor, and like some sort of KGB memory, my brain screeches that it’s my night.Jaysus, it’s like a pub band tuning up in a teacup.
I snap awake from the side of the bed. When it’s your night, you sleep on the end, of course. Thankfully, we got an Alaskan King size bed because otherwise, I don’t know how we would have done the arrangement. There were far too many jokes about a cuck couch for my liking. In fairness, I started half of them, like.
As I pad down the hallway, I’m thinking to myself that we don’t need a monitor at all, at all. The girls have lungs enough for the small two-bedroom house. Aisling waits until I’m halfway to the crib before joining in with her sisters—strategically timed, I’m convinced.
“Alright, alright, ye tiny dictators.” I scoop Fiona up and sway until she hiccups instead of screams. “Your timing is fierce impeccable, by the way, so it is. I’m only after closing me eyes, and here ye are staging a coup. Right when I achieved REM, I’m sure of it.”
I pick up the other two girls and make a mental note to ask Declan what his plan is for when they get too big to hold at once. Any delusions I had before they were born that my presence would be calming enough is gone. The triplets are tiny and angry up until the moment they have a bottle nipple in them. They’re even angry afterward. The way they gum those nipples, I’m relieved Willow chose to pump instead of breastfeeding. I shudder to think what it would have been like with three sets of teeth gnawing at her.
The next twenty minutes are a blur of spit-up, lullabies I don’t remember knowing, and a weird sort of peace, the kind of exhausted peace of someone disassociating.
I have them all three on my knee. Aisling’s the biggest so I have her up against my stomach, Magnolia in the middle leaning against her chest, and Fiona in the front leaning against her. I think I could imagine what Declan’s face would look like if he saw it. I’m chatting away to them, nonsense words mostly, but it keeps us from keeling over, all the same. I rock them back and forth and whisper, “You know,lasses, Declan probably has a binder in here somewhere to chart how many milliliters you take at night. I’m winging it, and look, ye’re thriving, so ye are.”
I set them each one at a time in their bassinets and rest my back against the wall, stealing a wink of sleep from the seconds of silence. The rain pitters and patters against the window. I crack an eye when I hear a squeak in the hall, and Willow appears inthe doorway, hair up, eyes soft. “You’re good with them,” she whispers.
“Don’t be telling Declan, now. He’ll only go editing that chart he’s making about who’s the best, altogether,” I tell her as she walks over to me and settles into my lap. I wrap my arms around her and inhale the scent of milk on her neck.
She kisses my cheek and smiles at me, wrapping her arms around me right back. “You’re allowed to be good at something without pretending it’s an accident.”
“You always know what to say to put me in my place, don’t you?” I ask her, shaking her slightly, a twinge of guilt panging in my chest. Declan means well. He’s just different than I am, and part of me doesn’t understand it.
“Well, we could all hear you on the monitor, goof,” she says, kissing my lips and standing. “Come back to bed now.”
The triplets sigh in their sleep, and I look up at their mother, her green eyes wide and her lips barely open. The look on her face is everything. It’s sultry and maternal and wondering and loving, and I want to study it and know it. In time, I will.
For now, I shake my head and tell her, “I’m not done yet. I will. I love you, ’Lo.”
“I love you too, Sean,” she says with an eye roll in the doorway, popping her leg like a character in a movie.
I chuckle and look down at the babies. “She means it, I promise. She does, the fierce woman.”
That’s how sure I am.
35
ROWAN
’Tis early in the morning,and I’m in the kitchen with a bottle warmer that hates me, so it does. The steam’s rising away in tiny ghosts, and I’m breathing through the urge to curse.
Aisling’s soft wail filters down the hall, barely a protest, more like a question. I’ve learned her cadence—three short cries, one long. Hungry. Not scared.Christ, she’s fierce consistent for one so small.
