My mother talked to me the way you talk to a problem. Efficiently. At intervals. With the particular brevity of a woman who had things to get back to. I told myself it didn’t matter, and then I spent all that time with Connor, who talked to me the same way, and I told myself that didn’t matter either.
Then I had three babies, and a fifty-two-year-old man walked into my hospital room and started talking to my children like they were people, and something in me broke. I’m not sure how to handle it.
I bring him tea and sit down across from him and look at him holding my daughter in the lamplight. I need to deal with this paternity situation immediately, before I do something inadvisable. “I’m going to need to call Connor. There’s something we need to get done.”
He nods once. “Very well.”
I call Connor. “I’m putting you on speaker. Ronan is here too.”
“Hello, Connor.”
“What are you doing there?” he asks, very confused.
I’ve already told him why Ronan would be here, so I don’t repeat myself. “I want a paternity test, Connor. Let’s put this to bed, once and for all. Both of you will get tested. Agreed?”
18
RONAN
I already knowthe result of the test, but if it will settle Connor’s mind… “Of course.”
Silence from him. Sage worries her bottom lip, like he’ll give her more grief. Eventually, though, he says, “Fine. Fine, do your stupid test. It doesn’t matter. Those babies are mine, and your test is going to prove it. Don’t expect me to be gracious about it when it does, Ronan.”
His anger regarding me and Sage is to be expected, I suppose. Even though he had unceremoniously dumped her before we hooked up, he’s entitled to his unreasonable anger on the matter. “I don’t expect anything but the result of the test to be accepted.”
“I never expect you to be gracious, Connor,” Sage says, without heat. “I just need you to agree to the test.”
“I agreed. Did you not hear me agree?” He hangs up.
Sage picks up her phone, looks at it for a moment, and puts it face-down on the cushion. Then she picks up her tea again.
“He’ll come around.” I’m not entirely sure this is true, but I say it because it is what I’m working toward, and working toward a thing is the first step to it being true.
She looks at me. “You don’t have to manage my feelings about Connor, you know. I’m not fragile on that score.”
“I know you’re not.” I pause. “I suppose I’m managing my own.”
“Connor was here earlier,” she says.
“I gathered. You were telling him you wouldn’t marry him when I arrived, so…?”
“He proposed when he was here.”
I keep my expression level. “Did he?”
She wraps both hands around her mug. “He believes what he believes. I think part of him always will, regardless of what a test says. That’s just how he’s built.”
The flat, armored look in Connor’s eyes in the hospital corridor comes to mind, alongside the rawness underneath it. I spent years watching from the edges of his life, waiting for an invitation I should have understood he didn’t know how to extend. And now, the shape of his family shifts once more.
It is little surprise he’s not taking the news well.
Sage’s cottage is small and warm and smells of vanilla, which I notice immediately and then make a concerted effort to stop noticing, with limited success. There are baby things arranged with the efficient logic of someone who has thought carefully about workflow. The changing supplies are within arm’s reach of the cribs, the feeding chair positioned near the window where the morning light comes in.
There’s so much about Sage I don’t know. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to learn more about you, considering… everything. Tell me about yourself.”
She raises an eyebrow. “That’s a broad question.”
“It is. Take it whatever direction you like.”
