The whole world looks different now. I’m a mom.
There’s something more contained about him now, something pulled tight beneath the surface, like whatever cracked when he recognized me has already been locked back into place.
Professional. Controlled. Untouchable.
My throat feels dry when I swallow. “Are they okay?”
“They’re great,” he says, and his tone is even, measured, like it was before, like it’s always been. “They’ll need monitoring, but they’re strong.”
I nod, even though it feels like too much effort, tears slipping quietly as I let that sink in. “Thank you.”
It’s not enough. It will never be enough. But it’s all I have.
His gaze holds mine for a second—just one—and something shifts there, something I don’t have the energy to understand. Then it’s gone.
“They’re going to take good care of you,” he says, already stepping back, putting distance between us like it belongs there.
I’m exhausted and aching and full in a way I don’t know how to process, listening to my babies cry and trying to convince myself that this—whatever just happened between us—was nothing more than what it had to be.
“Can I—” My voice falters, rough and unfamiliar. “Can I see them?”
“You will,” he says. “They’ll bring them to you briefly before transport.”
Relief loosens something tight in my chest. I watch him as he speaks, the way he holds himself, the way everything about him has shifted back into something controlled and contained. It’s like the version of him from before—on the plane, in that narrow space where it was just us—is gone, replaced by this one.
The doctor. The man who belongs here.
The man who doesn’t belong to me.
“Thank you,” I say again, softer this time, because the words still feel too small but I don’t have anything else to give him.
“You did the hard part,” he says with half a smile.
A nurse moves into my line of sight, speaking gently about next steps, about recovery, about what to expect in the next few hours.
I try to listen. I really do. But my attention drifts. Back to my babies. Back to him.
12
RONAN
I’ve been involvedin hundreds of deliveries. Possibly thousands, if one counts every rotation, every residency shift, every on-call night that bled into morning. I’ve held screaming, red-faced, miraculous little creatures in my gloved hands more times than I can count. I know what to say to a mother in the first seconds after birth. I know how to read a room, read a monitor, read the silent language of a struggling infant who needs me to think fast and move faster.
I don’t know what to say now.
I stand at the nursery window, still in my scrubs, watching the nurses settle three bassinets into a neat row. Three. God help me. All healthy. All furious about being born, if the earlier screaming was any indication, and now all sleeping with the boneless, absolute certainty of beings who have never once worried about anything. They had months of dark warmth and someone else’s heartbeat, and now they’re here, and the world has to sort itself out around them.
I press the heel of my hand against the glass and exhale.
Sage is asleep. She dropped off before the nurses could hand her the first one—not unusual after a labor like that, especially a triplet delivery complicated by the preeclampsia I’ve been quietly managing from the moment I walked into that room and recognized her. The moment my brain short-circuited and my body went on autopilot, because thirty years of training is the only thing that stands between me and absolute, undignified shock.
I managed. That’s the important thing. I managed, and she’s fine, and the babies are fine, and I’m standing at a nursery window at half past four in the morning, trying to understand how this has happened to me.
Not the babies. I understand the biology with painful clarity.
The how of it. How she has ended up here, in my hospital, on my watch, when Boston is a city of nearly seven hundred thousand people and I’ve spent the better part of nine months trying not to think about her and largely failing.
I’m not religious. Haven’t been since I was a young widower and decided that a God who lets Aoifa die on a Tuesday afternoon while I’m on the phone confessing an affair isn’t a God who deserves my devotion. I’ve made my peace with the universe being random and indifferent and occasionally catastrophic.
