He’s quiet. Bossy makes a sound from the bedroom that is not yet a complaint but is the announcement that a complaint is being drafted. Connor looks toward the sound, and something moves across his face. Not anger exactly. I’m not sure what it is.
“Fine. This is the last time you’ll ever see me.”
“I think that’s probably for the best.”
He nods once, sharp and final, and walks back down my front path. I watch him go with the particular mixed feeling of watching someone you once genuinely cared about choose pain over sense and knowing there is nothing you can do to change it. The sad part is that I do still care about him. Not romantically, but in the way you care about a person who needs more help than they’d accept and who you quietly hope finds their way to it eventually.
I hope he does. I mean that.
But I’m also standing here in my doorway in the cold, aware that the weight I’ve been carrying since the day he dumped me in that airport is finally, completely gone. Not just lighter. Gone.
I close the door and lean against it. Just as I start to breathe, Bossy makes her opinion of this known at volume. I go and get her.
Leigh arrives a while later with bagels and the careful expression of a woman who has been watching from her window. She sets everything on the counter and turns and looks at me with the assessment of someone checking whether a structure survived a storm. “You all right?”
“Yeah, I actually am.”
She studies me for a moment. “He’s not coming back this time, is he?”
“No. I think he means it.”
A pause. “Is that what you want?”
“So very, very much.”
Leigh nods. She doesn’t look entirely convinced—she has always rooted for Connor more than I thought was warranted, and I’ve never fully understood why—but she accepts the answer, which is what I need.
She hands me half a bagel and goes to check on the babies, lifting Baldy out of her crib with the reverent, slightly dazed expression she gets every time, like she still can’t believe they’re real. “She has no hair,” she says, for approximately the fifteenth time since they were born. “Like, none at all.”
“Hence the nickname.”
“She’s perfect.”
“She is,” I agree. “They all are. Now tell me if you want cream cheese because I’m not sharing mine.”
Leigh laughs, and I laugh, and Baldy looks between us with the serene indifference of someone who has not yet developed opinions about cream cheese, and the morning settles into something easy and ordinary that feels, after the past ten days, like a minor gift.
Bossy has moved on from her protest and is in her crib conducting what appears to be a thorough audit of the ceiling—she does this for long stretches, staring upward with intense concentration, occasionally delivering commentary in her not-quite-crying sound.
Boy is in his crib doing what Boy does, which is lie quietly and think. I genuinely believe he is thinking. There’s something behind his eyes—not the unfocused blur of a newborn but not yet a coherent thought, something in between, patient and interior. Ronan has the same quality. That gathering-before-speaking thing, the sense of someone who is always slightly behind their own eyes, considering.
I find it restful rather than unnerving. I find almost everything about Ronan restful rather than unnerving, which is a sentence I could not have imagined saying about anyone six months ago and which I am choosing not to examine too closely today.
Leigh is full of questions today. “When was it that Connor cheated on you again?”
“About six months before we broke up. That I know of.” I shrug.
“Why’d you stay?”
“He’s human. Humans make mistakes. Not that he ever really apologized for it… but I could tell he was sorry. Or he performed sorry well enough that it counted. I dunno. I’m not sure howinvested I was in the whole thing in the first place. But anyway, people make mistakes, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Besides, it was just the one time… I can forgive one time, you know?”
Her brow lines. “I suppose so. I hate to talk about heavy shit and run, but I have a contract I have to work on?—”
“Thanks for the bagels and the chat. Don’t let me stop you from getting paid, girl.”
