She half smiles and leaves, and I spend the rest of the day in the particular pleasant rhythm that I’m starting to think of as my actual life now—the rotation of feeding and changing and walking and the brief windows in between where I do something for myself. Currently, that means checking my online training metrics, answering emails, filming fifteen-minute low-impact workout videos in my sitting room while the babies watch from their cribs with varying degrees of interest.
Bossy has opinions about my cool-down stretches. Boy watches the whole thing from start to finish without moving. Baldy falls asleep during the warm-up and stays that way for forty minutes.
My online numbers are good. Better than good, honestly—the pregnancy content drew a following I didn’t expect, and the pivot to gentle postpartum workouts has kept them. My actual life, the one I was so afraid of nine months ago, is turning out to be something I didn’t know I was building toward.
Building toward something makes me think about Ronan, and I’m texting him before I can stop myself.Connor came by. Says it’s the last time. I think he means it.
He replies in under two minutes.How are you feeling about that?
Like myself, I type back.Which is the best I’ve felt in a while.
Glad to hear it.
I put the phone down, and I’m smiling at the ceiling, which is becoming a habit, and I think that of all the unexpected developments in my life over the past nine months, this particular one might be my favorite.
22
RONAN
I am sittingin my study with a glass of Jameson I have not touched and a book I have not opened, doing the thing I’ve become embarrassingly fluent at lately, which is thinking about Sage, when someone hammers on my front door at nine forty-seven in the evening.
Some part of me knows exactly who it is. The same part of me that reminds me of my every failing as a father.
I set down the Jameson and go to the door.
Connor is in my hallway when I open the door. He’s not sober, that much is clear. Enough that the edges of him are loose. The armor he wears so consistently is slightly displaced, and what’s showing underneath is something I’ve been watching for across too many careful dinners and too-brief phone calls.
He looks, for the first time since he was small, like he needs his father.
“Come in,” I say.
He comes in and doesn’t sit. He moves around my sitting room with the restless, contained energy of someone with too much feeling and nowhere to put it. I sit in the armchair and let him move, because trying to contain Connor when he’s like this has never worked and I learned that lesson years ago.
“She told me to go find my own life,” he says. Not quite to me. To the room.
“That sounds like her.”
He looks at me sharply. “You don’t know her.”
“Not yet. But from what I’ve seen, she says the true thing directly. I expect that’s part of what you liked about her, particularly given your career field. That’s part of what makes this harder.”
He stops moving. He stands in the middle of my sitting room and the flat, armored expression I know so well cracks slightly at the edges. Underneath it is something raw and young, and it does something to my chest that I don’t have a word for.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks. “On the phone. When I told you about her. You just listened, and you didn’t say a word.”
“I didn’t know who she was to you,” I say. “You never said her name to me, so I thought she was yet another girl you dated, but didn’t connect to. I didn’t know who she was to you until the day after the kids were born.”
The silence that follows is long and specific until he breaks it. “This is fucked.”
“In some regards, yes.”
He sits. Heavily, in the way of someone whose legs have made a decision ahead of the rest of him. He puts his elbows on his knees and looks at the floor, and I give it space to land because this is the kind of information that needs to settle before a person can respond to it usefully.
“So the whole time,” he says. “The whole pregnancy. She knew, and she didn’t say anything.”
“She didn’t know who I was to you either. Not until the same day I knew.” I keep my voice steady. “Neither of us was keeping a secret, Connor. We didn’t have the information.”
“Convenient.”
