I’d been expecting this. I’m not offended by it. I’d ask the same thing in his shoes.
“No.” I swallow, hoping he doesn’t freak out. “There’s only you in that time period. My ex and I hadn’t slept together in two months before I got on that plane. Some kind of horseback riding injury, he said.” I make a vague gesture that I hope communicates the rest of that sentence without me having to say it. “Anyway. The timeline is clear. There was no one else.”
Something moves across his face. It isn’t quite what I expected—not relief, not panic. Something more complicated than either.
“Alright then,” he says, after a moment.
We look at each other across the room, and I think, not for the first time, that this is genuinely one of the stranger situations two people can find themselves in. I know what he sounds likewhen he loses control. I know the weight of his hands and the particular way he said my name in the dark, low and deliberate, like he was tasting it.
“So,” I say, because the silence is starting to do things to me. “Full-service doctor, then.”
He blinks. “I beg your pardon?”
“You delivered my babies, managed my blood pressure, came back this morning to check on me, and you’re currently holding one of them so I can eat my terrible hospital breakfast in something approaching peace.” I nod at the tray on my bedside table, which has been getting cold for the better part of an hour. “That’s full service.”
“Ah.” He glances down at the baby, then back at me. “I suppose it is, when you put it that way.”
“Is this part of the standard package, or am I a special case?”
There it is again—that smile, faster this time, like he’s stopped trying to catch it before it gets out. “I would say that you are a somewhat exceptional circumstance.”
“Exceptionally inconvenient?”
“No. You’re not that.”
I stare down at my baby, trying to formulate what to say next, and I’m at a loss. I just told him the Big Deal, and he’s calm and collected, while I’m ready to lose my mind.
“She looks like you,” Ronan says quietly, from across the room.
I look up. He’s watching us with an expression that has gone somewhere unguarded, somewhere past the careful composure, and my chest does something inconvenient and involuntary inresponse. “The boy might have your coloring. It’s too early to tell, I think.”
“My hair was dark before it decided to do—this.” He nods upward, indicating the silver, and I have to actively resist smiling, because the self-deprecating gesture is so at odds with the rest of him—with the authority he carries so naturally, with the way everyone in that delivery room last night moved when he spoke.
“How old were you when it went?” I ask.
“Forty-three.” A pause. “Practically overnight, or so it felt. My sister Mary said it made me look distinguished. I’m not entirely sure she meant it as a compliment.”
I laugh, and it’s the first real laugh I’ve managed since yesterday, loose and unpracticed, and it startles all three babies, who collectively decide this is the moment to express their displeasure. The two in the bassinets ramp up immediately, and the one Ronan is holding opens his eyes and looks personally offended.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say, though I’m still half smiling. “Okay. Crisis.”
Ronan is already moving. He sets the boy gently back in his bassinet and lifts Baldy before the crying can fully escalate, and I watch him do it—this middle-aged silver-haired cardiologist in scrubs, holding a screaming infant with the same unhurried competence he apparently applies to everything—and I think, with a clarity that surprises me:I am in so much trouble.
Between the two of us, we get all three to a manageable volume within a few minutes, and then we’re just sitting in my small hospital room, each holding a baby, in the particular exhausted quiet that follows a minor emergency.
“I have to tell you something,” Ronan says, after a moment.
“Okay.”
He meets my eyes. “The man your friend brought in this morning. Your ex.” A pause, measured and deliberate. “Connor.”
“You know him?”
He holds my gaze, and I can see him deciding to just say it, plainly, the way I appreciated him doing everything else. “He’s my son.”
The bed drops out from under us, and it takes blinking a few times before it comes back. “Connor. Connor Bird. Is your son.”
“Yes.”
