Then she shifts the baby on her shoulder and says, “You’d better come in properly, then. We have some things to talk about.”
I would say that is almost certainly true.
15
SAGE
The thingabout having triplets is that the moment you think you have one of them sorted, the other two stage a coordinated revolt. I’ve been in this hospital room for less than twenty-four hours and I’ve already learned this lesson approximately eight times. I’m currently feeding the dark-haired girl—the one I’ve privately started calling Bossy, because she screams the loudest and longest until she gets what she wants, which I respect—while the bald girl and the boy fuss at a low, warning simmer in their bassinets by the window.
Naming is… on my ever-growing to-do list, so for now, it’s Bossy, Baldy, and Boy.
Ronan asks, “May I?” Then gestures to the basinet. I’m only too happy to have another pair of hands, so I nod. He slowly walks Boy around, cooing at him. He’s still in his scrubs. There is something deeply unfair about how good he looks in them.
Not that I notice all that much. I focus on Bossy, who is feeding.
“She’s got a good latch,” he observes from across the room, and I look up to find him watching me with the same calm, assessingexpression he’s been wearing since he walked back through my door this morning. Clinical, mostly. But there’s something underneath it that I recognize, because I’ve seen it before—on a plane, in the dark, when he looked at me like I was something he intended to pay very close attention to.
“The nurse spent forty minutes helping me figure that out. Rose. She’s a saint. I’m leaving her everything in my will.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “I’ll pass along the compliment.”
“Please do.” I shift Bossy slightly and wince. “Also, nobody warned me that this would feel like being chewed on by something with no teeth but enormous commitment.”
He has one of those smiles that seems to surprise even him, like it escaped before he could decide whether to let it out.
Boy has gone quiet. Ronan looks down at him briefly, then back at me, and the moment stretches in a way that I don’t entirely know what to do with, given that I am sitting in a hospital bed with a baby attached to my chest and my hair in a knot that has not been intentional for at least six hours.
“Can I ask you something?” he says.
“You’re holding my baby and you’ve seen me at my absolute worst. I think you’ve earned a question.”
That earns me another flicker of the smile. He settles into the chair beside the window, the boy still cradled against his chest, and looks at me with an expression that is measured and careful and also, underneath all of that, genuinely curious. “How long have you been in Boston?”
“Four years. Came for a training position at a gym in Back Bay, stayed because I liked it.” I pause. “You?”
“Most of my adult life, with occasional interruptions for conferences and family obligations.” He tilts his head slightly. “You’ve been managing this pregnancy on your own the entire time.”
It isn’t quite a question, but it has the shape of one. “I have.”
“That’s—” He stops. Recalibrates. I watch him choose his words with the care of a man who has learned, probably the hard way, that some sentences cannot be unsaid. “That must have been a great deal to carry alone.”
“I had Leigh,” I say, and then feel the complicated weight of that settle over me, because Leigh was there, right up until she walked Connor through that door this morning and blew everything sideways. “She’s my best friend and neighbor. She built my website, helped me pivot my training business online when my blood pressure got complicated, brought me food when I couldn’t stand the smell of anything that wasn’t plain toast.” I look down at the baby. “She’s been incredible. I just—I don’t know why she brought him here. I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
“Him?”
Right. He doesn’t know. “My ex.”
“Perhaps she thought it was the right thing to do.” His voice is neutral. Not defending Leigh, exactly. Just leaving room.
“Maybe.” I’m not ready to be generous about it yet. “It wasn’t, but maybe she thought it was.”
He nods slowly, and I appreciate that he doesn’t push. He just lets it sit there, which is not something most people do. Most people, when they ask how you’re doing, are already formingtheir response before you’ve finished answering. Ronan listens like he actually intends to do something with what he hears.
I noticed that on the plane too.
“What is it that you actually want to know?” I ask, because I can feel it—there’s a question underneath the questions, and we’re both dancing around it with the elaborate courtesy of two people who have seen each other naked and are now pretending to be strangers.
He considers me for a moment. The baby in his arms makes a small, satisfied sound and goes entirely limp against his chest, and Ronan glances down at him with an expression that cracks something open in me that I’m not prepared to examine right now. “I want to know,” he says carefully, “whether there is any possibility—any at all—that I am not their father.”
