The thought makes tears slide down my temples into my hair. When I imagine not keeping it, my chest caves in. The idea feels like grief.
When I imagine keeping it, I feel terror so sharp it borders on panic.
I think about Connor and feel only relief that this baby isn’t his. There will be no shared custody battle with someone who treated me like an accessory.
Then I think about Ronan. About the steadiness in his voice. The certainty in his touch.
He assumed it would remain a memory. So did I. Now that memory has weight. Technically minuscule weight at the moment, but it’s there all the same.
“I don’t know what to do,” I whisper into the dark.
I’m terrified.
Terrified of losing my body as I know it. My independence. Terrified of doing this wrong. Terrified of doing it alone. But beneath all of it, underneath the panic and the logistics and the what-ifs, there is something else.
This tiny life is mine. To have removed or to keep, it’s mine.
The truth is, I already know the answer. I’ve always known that if I were to get pregnant, I’d keep it. I don’t judge anybody for handling it differently than I would.
Handling it differently than Iam.
I swallow hard. Did I really just make that decision?
Yeah. I think I did. I’m going to be a mom.
6
RONAN
Boston greetsme with its usual gray restraint. The sky hangs low over the harbor, the color of unpolished steel, and the wind carries that familiar Atlantic bite that slips easily through a man’s coat if he isn’t paying attention. Spring insists it has arrived, but the city clearly disagrees. Patches of old snow still cling stubbornly to the curbs along Beacon Hill, like guests who have overstayed their welcome.
I find the familiarity comforting. Boston has never been a city for emotional displays. It expects a man to conduct his affairs quietly, efficiently, and without unnecessary drama. That suits me perfectly well. Routine has always been my greatest ally, and the city seems built around it.
By the time I reach Massachusetts General, the hospital is already alive with activity. Nurses move briskly through the corridors with tablets tucked beneath their arms, residents gather around workstations murmuring over charts, and the scent of antiseptic drifts through the air in that strange, sterile way hospitals seem to manage no matter how many times theyclean the place. The rhythm of it all settles my mind almost immediately.
Work begins early and rarely slows once it starts. Rounds occupy the first part of the morning as I move from room to room reviewing charts and speaking with patients. Consultations follow quickly afterward, most of them involving complications that other departments prefer to hand off to someone with my particular background. By the time surgery arrives on the schedule, the day has already gathered a certain momentum that carries me through the next several hours without pause.
My professional path has always been a somewhat unusual one. Cardiology and obstetrics are not specialties most physicians think to combine, yet the intersection of maternal health and cardiovascular complications has occupied the better part of my career. Pregnancy places extraordinary strain on the heart, and when something goes wrong the consequences can become catastrophic with alarming speed. My work exists precisely in that narrow space where two lives depend on the steady judgment of the physician standing in the room.
It is demanding work, but I have never been one to shy away from difficulty. Precision matters here. Calm matters even more. There is very little room for hesitation when a mother’s heart begins to falter during labor, and the responsibility of managing that crisis is something I accepted long ago.
The younger doctors sometimes watch me with a mixture of admiration and unease that I recognize from my own training years. Reputation tends to accumulate slowly in medicine, but eventually it begins to carry weight. My name appears in enough journals now that the residents occasionally quote my own research back to me during rounds. Three papers published this year alone, with another currently under review. The work hasa way of building upon itself once the foundation is properly established.
Callahan Labs contributes to that momentum as well. The company was originally my father’s creation, built with the stubborn determination of a man who believed medical research could reshape the future if the right people were given the proper resources. I inherited both the laboratory and the responsibility that came with it. These days we fund cardiovascular trials across the country, and investors seem eager to attach themselves to anything bearing the Callahan name.
By most definitions, the situation would be considered a success. The hospital respects my work. The lab continues to expand. The career I spent decades constructing now runs with the steady reliability of a machine that rarely requires adjustment.
Still, success has a peculiar way of echoing when a man returns home at night.
Connor occupies more of my thoughts than I ever realized he would. When Cathryn confessed to the pregnancy, I was deep in my grief over Aoifa. I put it out of my mind—I could handle only one life-changing event at a time. But he represented a hope for the future, no matter how marred the circumstances of his birth.
My son is twenty-six now, a grown man by any reasonable standard, yet the connection between us has never settled into something comfortable. When he was younger, my career demanded more hours than I had to give, and I allowed that excuse to stand far longer than it should have.
I should have been there for him. Not that it matters now. What’s done is done. What matters now is where we go from here.
I hate that he did not come for the holiday. The family had hoped…
I sigh at myself. Ruminating won’t change the fact that he chose not to show up. Connor represents a time in my life I’m not proud of, but I’d like to be proud of him regardless of my mistakes. Whether he gives me the opportunity to be proud of him is his choice.
