I look down at the baby in my arms. Then back up at Ronan. Then down again. “Huh.” Genuinely, it’s the only word I have.
Ronan waits. He’s good at that. He has the particular patience of someone who has delivered bad news in professional settings for decades and understands that the person on the receiving end needs a moment to let it reorganize inside them before they can respond to it usefully.
I appreciate it. But I need him to fill in the blanks. “Does he know? That you’re—that you’re his father?”
“He knows,” Ronan says. “We don’t have the kind of relationship that knowledge has done much to build, I’m afraid.”
I absorb that. There is an entire story in that sentence, and I don’t have the first chapter of it yet. But I can hear the weight of it in his voice. He’s not happy about the situation.
“Okay. So just to be clear about where we are…” I look at the baby in my arms, then at the one in Ronan’s, then at the third in the bassinet who has somehow managed to fall back asleep through all of this, because apparently she has inherited my ability to choose the most inconvenient possible moment to disengage. “These three are yours. And the man who thought they were his is also yours.”
“That is an accurate summary, yes.”
“Huh.”
He watches me with that careful, steady attention. “You’re handling this remarkably well.”
“I’m not,” I tell him honestly. “I’m just very tired, and when I’m very tired, I go quiet instead of loud. Give me eight hours of sleep, and I’ll probably have a lot more feelings about this.”
“That seems reasonable.” He sighs at the baby in his arms. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. For the entirety of the situation.”
I look at him. He means it. “And how are you taking it?”
A nervous laugh escapes him, and he looks confused.
I didn’t know he could ever be nervous about anything. In what little experience I have of him, nervousness is not in his vocabulary. No wonder he’s so bad at it.
16
RONAN
Connor is her ex-boyfriend.My son. Her ex. They broke up in Galway on Saint Patrick’s Day, at which point she got on a plane and sat down next to me.
This is a scenario I wasn’t expecting.
I have delivered news of this magnitude to hundreds of patients and their families. I have watched people absorb the unabsorbable and then, eventually, proceed. I have always believed the most useful thing one can do in the moment of impact is stay still and let the person find their own footing rather than rushing to offer a hand they aren’t ready to take.
I find myself at odds with my own footing.
It occurs to me, sitting across from Sage in her hospital room with a newborn between us and the morning light coming gray through the window, that I have never been the one receiving this kind of news before.
When I learned of Aoifa’s fate, it was tragic and horrifying, but it was also over. There were no lingering outcomes regarding herhealth. No further treatment or changes required—the finality of death closes that door.
This is something else entirely.
I have always been the one delivering this type of news. I’m not entirely sure I am as good at receiving as I am at delivering, but I hope to manage it with at least a passing approximation of grace.
I slept with my son’s girlfriend.
Hours after he ended things with her, on my aircraft, without knowing who she was to him. Without knowing who he was to her. The universe, apparently, has a very particular sense of humor, and I am the punch line.
“You didn’t know who I was to him.” It’s not a question.
I nod. “Not a clue. And you?”
She shakes her head. “Not remotely. I wouldn’t have…”
“Me either.”
