The youngest of them. In a small, warm cottage across town, breathing their loud, reliable breaths, with their mother whohas been managing alone for nine months and is still uncertain whether she is enough for them. It’s the most groundless uncertainty I have encountered in recent memory. But I understand it, because I carried a version of it myself for years, the particular fear of a parent who is not sure they are equal to the job.
I clear my schedule for the morning. I have not taken leave since Aoifa died. I have not, if I’m honest, taken leave of any meaningful duration in approximately a decade. Work has been, for most of my adult life, the thing I do when I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts, and I have consequently become very good at my job and very practiced at being alone with my thoughts in controlled, clinic-appropriate doses only.
The penthouse is quiet and clean and entirely unchanged, and I move through it this morning with the sense of a man whose life has reorganized itself around a new center of gravity that is located, specifically, in a cottage across town.
When Sage calls, it’s a welcome change of pace. Until I hear her tone. “The results are here, and Connor is on his way.”
I’m at Sage’s cottage in half an hour.
She opens the door, looking like she has slept marginally more than the night before, which is progress. She’s wearing leggings and an oversized sweater, and her hair is in a knot again. She has a baby in one arm with the already-practiced ease of someone whose body has simply incorporated this as its new default setting. “Hey?—”
“Good morning. Have you looked at the results?”
“I wanted to wait.” She steps back to let me in. “Open it with him. Let him see I didn’t alter them or whatever.”
“Wise.” I come in, and she hands me the bald girl she calls Baldy for now. She is the observant one, who regards me with her usual evaluating gravity. We wait in the particular taut quiet of people who know what is coming and are simply waiting for it to become official.
Connor arrives eleven minutes later. I know because I check my watch, not because I’m timing him, but because timing things is a habit so ingrained that I do it without deciding to. He looks like a man who has been awake longer than I have and has spent the time less productively. He doesn’t look at me when he comes in, and I don’t press him on anything.
No sense in poking the bear.
I have learned this, slowly and at some cost, over the years of trying to build something with Connor from insufficient materials and too much distance. You cannot manufacture connection. You can only show up and let it develop or not, and accept which of those outcomes you’re given.
“Let’s just do this,” he says.
Sage opens the email on her phone. She reads it once, to herself, and her expression gives nothing away. She would be an exceptional poker player. Then she looks up at Connor as she passes him her phone. “Ronan is the father.”
Connor goes very still. It’s the stillness of a man who has just had confirmed what some part of him already knew and had been fighting. I watch his face, and I see the moment the fight goes out of it. What’s left underneath is something I recognize because I have seen it before, in the mirror, in the years after Aoifa.
It is grief, plain and unadorned.
“Connor,” I start.
“Don’t.” He says it quietly, without heat. He’s looking at the floor. “Just don’t, for a minute.”
So, I don’t.
Sage never wanted this for him. I could see that when she talked about him, the weariness of someone who has genuinely cared about a person and is watching them struggle with something she cannot fix. She folds her arms around herself slightly, not coldly but as a kind of private steadying.
“You couldn’t just let me have this,” he says. To himself? To God? I’m not sure who he means.
“Connor—”
“I know.” He pushes a hand through his hair. “I know. It’s not anyone’s fault, is it? That’s the stupid part. Nobody did anything wrong.” He laughs, but it’s the dry, mirthless kind. “Except maybe the timing.”
Sage quietly says, “I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I know you didn’t.” He picks up his jacket from where he’d dropped it on the arm of her sofa. He’s leaving, I can see it, and I have approximately thirty seconds to decide whether to let him go or to say the thing I’ve been turning over since yesterday.
“I want you in their lives,” I say.
He stops. Turns.
“They’re your half siblings. Whatever else is complicated between us, that isn’t. I want them to know you, and I want you to know them.” I pause. “I want to know you, Connor. I knowthat’s not a simple thing to say at this particular moment. I know the timing is a lot. But I mean it.”
He looks at me for a long moment. His expression is impossible to read, which is not unusual, but I get the sense that he’s actually listening. His jaw works slightly, the way it does when he’s deciding whether to say the true thing or the easier thing. “I’ll call you.”
He leaves. The door closes quietly, and that quietness tells me more than a slam would have. Connor slamming doors is Connor performing. Connor merely closing a door is Connor feeling something he doesn’t know what to do with.
