But this doesn’t feel random.
“Dr. Callahan.” One of the nurses, Bridget, appears at my elbow. She’s young, efficient, and almost certainly wondering why the attending cardiologist is still haunting the maternity wing. “Would you like to hold one of them before you go?”
I should say no. I should go home, pour three fingers of Jameson, and stare at my ceiling until my clinical brain reasserts itself.
“The boy,” I say instead.
Bridget doesn’t blink. She goes in and comes back with a small, tightly swaddled bundle that she places in my arms with the practiced ease of someone who has done this a thousand times. I shift my grip automatically—I know how to hold a newborn, have known since before most of the nursing staff were born themselves—and look down.
The boy is dark-haired. A fine, soft fuzz that could go any direction from here. His face is scrunched in sleep, small fist pressed against his cheek. He is deeply, profoundly unimpressed with the world, and I find myself fighting a smile I have absolutely no business feeling.
Something happens in my chest.
I wasn’t there when Connor was born. That’s a fact I’ve never talked about to anyone, never put language to, because language makes it real and real makes it something I have to sit with. Cathryn called me from the hospital. I’d been in the middle of a fourteen-hour shift and she called to say it was done, the boy was healthy, she’d named him Connor James Bird, and I said congratulations and went back to my patients because there was nothing else to say.
We were never a couple, and given the circumstances, I wasn’t exactly interested in being particularly involved. So, I never held Connor as an infant.
I haven’t let myself think about what that means until right now, at half past four in the morning, with the full, belated weight ofevery choice I’ve made in the last twenty-six years settling onto my shoulders all at once.
“There you are,” I say quietly. Just to say something. Just to fill the silence with something other than the sound of my own thoughts.
The boy’s fist twitches. His mouth purses and releases. He doesn’t wake up.
I stand there longer than I mean to. I’m aware of the nurses moving around me, the hum of the ward, and the distant sound of another baby fussing down the hall, aware of all the ordinary machinery of a hospital night. None of it touches me. I’m standing very still in the middle of it, holding a child who is either the child of an unknown father, or my son that I hadn’t known I was about to have, and I can’t yet tell which possibility frightens me more.
Both, probably. Both, in equal measure, for entirely different reasons. She said she had just gotten dumped before we hooked up. If the kids are his… that will make life complicated for her and the children. If they are mine… I have no idea what comes next.
Sage’s face comes to mind. The way she looked at me when she first saw me over her—the contraction hitting at exactly the wrong moment, her jaw tight, her eyes wide, and then narrowing as she decided there was simply no time to deal with this particular disaster right now. She was right. There wasn’t. We both made the wordless decision to shelve the recognition. She pushed, and I worked, and the three of them arrived one after the other with a speed that still impresses me professionally.
She was extraordinary. She’s a personal trainer, thus, her musculature is well-developed, so I assume that has something to do with it. Whatever the case, it was a hell of a performance.
I didn’t let myself think that in her room. I lock it away behind every procedural thought I need to have. But now, alone in the corridor with her sleeping son in my arms, I let myself think it. She is fierce and exhausted and absolutely determined, and she did it without anyone beside her who should have been there. No partner. No father of her children. Just her and a room full of strangers, and me, who is neither a stranger nor anything else she can yet name.
The boy makes a small sound. Not crying—something lower that resolves back into sleep before it becomes anything.
I look at his face for another long moment. Then I carefully pass him back to Bridget, who takes him with a smile that asks no questions.
“Thank you.” I mean it for the nurse. I’m not entirely sure I don’t mean it for someone else.
I walk the length of the maternity corridor slowly, pausing outside Sage’s room. Through the window and past the drawn shade, I see the edge of her bed, the monitor screen, the dim glow of the night-light some thoughtful nurse has switched on. I can’t see her face.
I have no right to go in. She hasn’t invited me. I am only the man from the plane, the doctor who happened to be on call, the stranger who caught her at her most impossible moment. Whatever conversation we need to have is waiting on the other side of sleep and shock, and walking into her room at half four in the morning is not the start of that conversation.
I stand there anyway. Unprofessional. Entirely unlike me. I stand there and listen to the quiet of the room and the distant sound of a hospital doing what hospitals do in the dark hours, and think. About fate, which I don’t believe in. And probability, which I do believe in, so that makes the math come out sideways. Which is not a thought a rational man entertains.
I head toward the attending lounge, where there’s a couch I have no intention of sleeping on and a coffee machine I intend to use aggressively past dawn. I have a full day ahead of me. Rounds. Patients who need me to be present. A situation I don’t yet understand the shape of.
There are three children sleeping in a row in a nursery thirty feet behind me.
A woman I can’t stop thinking about, who is exhausted and alone and entirely unaware that the man who could be the one who got her pregnant is currently walking in circles around her hospital ward because he can’t bring himself to leave.
I’ve been composed for years. I held it together through Aoifa’s death and the grief that came in waves for years after. I raised our girls as best I could, and they turned out spectacularly. Through Connor, through the distance, through every dinner that went stilted and every phone call that ended too soon. Through all of it, I have held my shit together.
Sitting on the vinyl couch in the attending lounge, I put my elbows on my knees and press my face into my hands.
Decades of composure, gone.
I hold pride in my reputation for keeping my cool. As a doctor, I am known for it. When others panic or don’t know what to do next, I am the one they call.
