She sits across from me. Takes a breath. “Connor called me. About four months into your pregnancy. He wanted to know how you were doing—he’d seen my comments on your fitnessposts, and he always knew we were close. I told him you were fine. And then he called again, and I told him you were fine again, and then—” She stops. “And then we just kept talking. Not about you, after a while. About other things. Everything. For months.”
I keep my expression neutral. I can feel the shape of where this is going.
“I should have told you,” she says. “I knew I should have told you. I told myself it was harmless, that I was a neutral party, that he was just worried and needed someone to talk to. But we became friends.” She finally looks at me. “I know that’s a betrayal, given everything that he did to you… I’m not even sure why. But we are.”
The kitchen is very quiet. Boy makes a small sound from the bedroom, settles himself, goes back to sleep. Baldy and Bossy are still down, which given the timing feels like the universe offering me a window to deal with this properly.
“You don’t even like him.”
She sighs. “I do, actually. I mean, yeah, he was a shitty boyfriend to you, but he’s been a good friend to me.”
Leigh, who has been sitting on my sofa and eating my food and holding my babies and looking me in the eye for months while knowing this, has been befriending my ex. Which explains why she brought him to the hospital, thinking she was bringing her friends back together.
I try to locate where the anger actually lives. I find it, eventually. It’s not where I expected. This is not about Connor at all, not entirely. It’s not even really about the deception itself, but aboutthe sitting on my sofa part. The holding my babies part. The looking me in the eye part.
It’s about being the last to know something that was happening in my own house.
“You could have told me when you two started… getting to know each other.”
“I should have. You’re right.”
I sit with that. There have been three years of mornings at my kitchen table and nights on my couch and all the small intimacies of a real friendship, and how many of them were happening at the same time as this. “You let me believe you barely knew him. Every time his name came up. Every time I talked about the pregnancy and the paternity, and all of it. You sat there, and you let me believe you were my person in this, and you were also?—”
“I was always your person,” she says quickly. “That was never not true.”
“Leigh.”
“I know.” She closes her eyes. “I know. I’m not asking you to be okay with it right now. I’m just—I can’t keep things from you. Even when the things are very inconvenient. I can’t do it anymore.”
I look at her for a long moment. Maybe I don’t have the right to feel betrayed. I didn’t tell her about the paternity of my kids, and I let her believe the wrong thing for months.
As it turns out, she did the same, on a different scale.
“Leigh, I need some time to sit with this.”
Her lip quivers. “Okay.”
“Not forever. I’m not… nothing as dire as what your expression makes it out to be. But I need to sit with it, and I can’t do that with you in the room.”
She holds my gaze for a moment. I can see her wanting to say something else. Leigh always has something else—she is constitutionally incapable of leaving a conversation at its natural endpoint—but she pulls it back. She stands up. “For the record,” she says, carefully, “When I brought him to the hospital, and it all went sideways, I told him it wasn’t right—the circumstances, the deception. I told him we should have been honest about it.”
I look at her. “When?”
“That afternoon. After I left the hospital.” She holds my eyes. “I’m not asking you to give me points for that. I’m just—I want you to know the full picture. He didn’t want me to tell you. He thought you’d think the worst of us… but I wanted you to know.”
The full picture. I sit with the full picture for a moment, because it is more complicated than I’d assembled, and I owe it the time to assemble properly. Leigh, who spent months managing a conflict of interest I didn’t know existed and eventually, imperfectly, chose me.
That matters. I’m not ready to say so yet, but it matters. “Thank you for telling me. Go home, Leigh.”
She leaves the pastries on my counter and walks out, closing the door quietly behind her.
I sit at my kitchen table in the silence.
I have been asking for honesty from everyone my whole life. After my father left for a pack of cigarettes when I was a kid,honesty is what matters to me. I asked for it from Connor, from Leigh, from Ronan. But how much of it have I been willing to practice myself?
I didn’t tell Leigh who the father was for nine months. I let her believe Connor was the father, not because I actively lied but because correcting her felt like more than I could manage, which is a distinction that sounds reasonable in my head and less reasonable when I say it plainly.
I was afraid of being judged. For the circumstances. For the one-night stand on a plane, which I am not ashamed of exactly but which felt, when I was pregnant and alone and already fielding enough opinions about my choices, like one more thing to defend. So I never corrected her assumption.
