“I have seen you at a level of difficulty that would have flattened most people. I have also watched you handle your business and feed three babies and manage a content schedule while working to solve my son’s emotional problems. I feel my assessment is reasonably grounded.”
She’s almost smiling. “You’re very… You notice things.”
“Noticing things goes with the occupation.”
She turns her head and looks at me for a moment with that direct, considering look. “Is that all it is?”
I meet her eyes. “No. That’s not all it is. I like paying attention to you.”
The room settles around that for a moment, warm and particular, and she turns back to the television, and neither of us says anything else, and the silence is the kind that means something. I wish I knew what that was.
“Why did you take paternity leave, Ronan? Really. You could have come by in the evenings. Kept your distance. But paternity leave?”
“Because keeping my distance would have been a pretense, and I am done with all that. I have already spent too much of my life using work as an excuse not to be where I should have been.” I pause, building courage to say the thing on the tip of my tongue. “And because I didn’t want to keep my distance.”
She turns her head and looks at me properly now.
“I want to be here. With you. With them. Not because of obligation or because it’s the correct thing to do. Because this is where I want to be. Quite specifically.”
Sage holds my gaze for a long moment, and then she does something that surprises me entirely. She reaches out and takes my hand, simply and without ceremony, the way she seems to do everything.
She doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. There’s something thrilling my blood when she laces her fingers between mine, like they belong there.
Because they do.
She takes a deep, contented breath and settles onto my shoulder to watch the movie that’s come on. Some old film I can’t pay attention to because I smell her hair. Vanilla and something uniquely Sage.
I don’t know when she falls asleep, but I notice when she snorts in her dreams. When her fingers stir between mine. When her sighs go from content to something restful.
I sneak a kiss on the top of her head, hoping to settle her dreams to something pleasant. I can’t believe she’s fallen asleep on me, because it feels more intimate than anything we did on my plane, and I’m not sure I’ve earned that with her.
But I suppose she’s decided that I have.
25
SAGE
I amthe luckiest single mother of triplets in the world.
I’ve had two months of Ronan showing up with groceries and opinions about my fridge and an apparently limitless patience for sitting on my sofa while I run through website analytics out loud, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, something has shifted in a way that I can’t pretend is just co-parenting.
The babies have changed. Bossy has discovered she can produce a sound that is not quite crying and not quite burbling, but is somewhere in between, a commentary track on the proceedings that she deploys constantly and at volume. Baldy has grown the most delicate suggestion of blond fuzz on the top of her head, which Leigh cried about and I photographed seventeen times. Guess I have to change her name at some point. Boy continues to observe the world with his father’s gravity and occasionally produces a smile of such wholehearted warmth that it stops every adult in the room completely.
I am completely hooked on all three of them. This is not a surprise. What is a surprise is how thoroughly and quietly I have also become hooked on their father.
I call Leigh while Ronan takes the babies out for a walk—he does this every morning, all three in the triple stroller he researched and selected with the same methodical thoroughness he apparently brings to all decisions, and it gives me an hour that is mine, which is both wonderful and disorienting because I’ve forgotten what to do with an hour that is mine.
“Talk me through something,” I say when she picks up.
“Ronan,” she says immediately.
“How did you?—”
“Sage. It’s been two months. Talk.”
I sit down on my kitchen counter and look at the ceiling. “I like him. I really, genuinely like him. Not just—not just the obvious stuff, though the obvious stuff is also very much present and accounted for.”
“The silver hair.”
