I sit behind the wheel for a moment without starting the engine. Just breathing. Sorting through it all.
The city moves around me, unhurried. Someone walks a dog past the end of her street. A light goes on in the upstairs window of the house across from hers. A couple passes on the pavement, close together against the cold, talking quietly. The ordinary evening business of people who have no idea that the man sittingin the parked car outside number fourteen has, in the past four days, had his entire life reorganized by a woman he met in an airport.
I have lived in this city for the better part of my adult life and I have never once driven past this cottage or this street, and now I’m sitting outside it at nine in the evening having just tucked a curl behind the ear of the mother of my children and I am fifty-two years old and I am smiling in my car like a man who has entirely lost the run of himself.
Aoifa would have found this hilarious. She had a gift for finding the comedy in the things I took most seriously about myself, and she was nearly always right to. I miss her every time when life does something that would have made her laugh.
I am in considerable trouble.
I am mostly certain I hear Aoifa say, “Good.”
19
SAGE
When you havethree newborns and a sort-of unresolved paternity situation and a best friend you’re not sure you’ve fully forgiven and an ex-boyfriend who will not stop texting, time is a construct.
Twenty-four hours of waiting for a paternity test to shut up my ex-boyfriend, however, makes time creep along slowly.
The babies do not care about any of this. The babies care about milk and warmth and the specific frequency of the white noise machine that Leigh calibrated before I came home, and they are ruthlessly efficient about communicating their needs regardless of what else is happening in my life. I respect this about them. For that matter, I aspire to it.
There’s something clarifying about being around creatures who have not yet learned to want things they don’t need. They are simply, entirely present in their own requirements, no performance, no management of anyone else’s feelings. Someday they will learn to do all of those things, because the world will teach them to, and I will be sad about it in the wayI imagine you are sad about every small loss of innocence. But right now they’re just here, and loud, and real, and mine.
I’m on hour three of what passes for a morning—feeding Baldy, who is the most patient of the three and also, I’m noticing, the most observant, lying there watching everything with the quiet intensity of someone taking notes—when Leigh knocks.
I let her in because she has a key, it’s easier than not letting her in, and I slept for two hours last night and need someone who is not a newborn to talk to. Like a saint, she has brought pastries. She sets them on my counter without making it a production and then turns and looks at me with the expression of a woman who has been rehearsing her opening line. “How mad are you still?”
“Honestly?” I shift the baby. “I don’t know. The Connor thing is complicated. I never wanted to hurt him. That was never what I wanted, even after everything, and right now he’s hurting, and part of that is because of how things unfolded at the hospital. So, I’m still processing it.”
“But Ronan?—”
“Is turning out to be a genuinely good person, which is helping.”
Leigh sits down at my kitchen table and pulls a pastry from the bag. “Tell me about him. If you want to talk, I mean.”
“There’s not much to tell yet. He’s…” I think about last night. His hands. The way he talks without wasted words. The way he looked at me when he said none of my mother’s coldness was in me, like he’d simply assessed the situation and was reporting his findings. “He’s nothing like I expected him to be.”
“Expected how?”
“I don’t know. Someone his age, his career, his… everything. I expected him to be more concerned with how this looks. It never came up. I thought he’d be more worried about managing it all…” I look at the baby in my arms. “Instead he just shows up. Helps with the babies. Makes eggs in top hats for dinner and talks to me for hours and tucks a curl behind my ear when he leaves.”
Leigh stares at me. “He made you eggs in top hats?”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“Sage, a cardiologist made you eggs in top hats in your kitchen after helping with your newborn triplets. That is objectively?—”
“Don’t,” I say again, but I’m fighting a smile, and she can tell.
“Sweet.” She leans back in her chair with the expression of someone settling in for the long view. “And you like him.”
“I just had his children. It would be strange if I didn’t at least like him.”
“That is not what I mean, and you know it.”
I look at the baby. She looks back at me. She has, I am now fairly certain, Ronan’s brow. That same slight severity, the expression of a person who is reserving judgment. For now.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel. What matters is the test results.”
