It’s the test that’s eating at me. Not because I have any uncertainty, but because Connor is on the other end of it. Because Connor is going to have to accept a reality he doesn’t want, and I don’t know how I’ll handle that.
He texts me three times before noon. The first isI hope you slept.The second isI’m serious about the ring.The third is just:Those are my kids, Sage. I know they are.
I don’t respond to any of them. There’s nothing to say that won’t make it worse, and I have enough on my plate without managing Connor’s expectations on top of it. I was with him for a long time. He commits. He just commits to the wrong things, in the wrong directions, for reasons he hasn’t fully examined. I used to think that was a young person’s problem. That the self-examining would come with time and consequence.
Then I watched him propose marriage to a woman he’d dumped months ago while high on a substance he won’t name, and I revised my assumptions on that.
I hope, not for the first time, that he finds his way to figuring himself out. Not for my sake. For his. There’s someone in there worth knowing. I caught glimpses of him in the moments when he stopped performing and just existed. Making me laugh in a parking lot late at night, working through a difficult client call with a patience that surprised me, sitting on my kitchen floor with a mug of tea he’d made himself and talking about his mother with a sadness so unguarded I didn’t know what to do with it.
That person is real. I want that person to succeed in life.
Without me. God, I hope he doesn’t show up today.
Ronan checks in around midday. A text, brief and considerate.Thinking of you all. Let me know if you need anything.
The contrast is not lost on me.
Leigh stays for most of the morning, and it’s almost like before, except for the thing sitting between us that we haven’t fully dealt with yet. I can feel her working up to something. “I should have told you,” she says, eventually, over the second round of coffee. “About Connor and me talking. I should have been honest about how much he’d been calling.”
“Yes,” I agree. “You should have.”
“I really thought I was helping.”
“I know you did. That’s the complicated part. I know your intentions were good, and it still went badly, and I still needed you to make a different call.” I look at her. “I need to be able to trust that when something involves me, you check with me first. That’s it. That’s all I need.”
She nods. “Okay. That’s fair. But, Sage?”
“Yeah?”
“You should have told me who the father was.”
I blink at her. “What did you just say?”
“I’ve been by your side the whole time. The whole pregnancy. I’ve been here for you, haven’t I?”
“Yeah, but?—”
“And you let me believe Connor was the dad.”
Okay, she has a point. I don’t like that. “It was no one’s business?—”
“It should have been mine.”
“You should have told me you were bringing Connor to the hospital!”
She snaps, “If you had told me who their father was, I never would have brought him!”
“Okay,” I exhale. “I’m too tired, and I don’t want to fight with you.”
She slowly nods. “I don’t want to fight with you either. It’s just… I felt like an idiot once I learned the truth. We’re close, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s hard to explain. I’m not even sure I know… I just, given that Ronan and I hooked up on his plane on the way back to Boston?—”
“Wait, really?”
