“This is nicer than the plane,” she says, eventually.
My laugh is a disorganized thing, because that is what I have become. That is what she made me. “The plane had significant limitations.”
She props herself up and looks at me in the low light. Her dark hair is entirely undone from whatever she’d done with it earlier and she looks, if it’s possible, even more herself like this than she does clothed. This version of her is private in a way that Iunderstand is not given easily, and I am aware that I’m lucky to be in the room for it.
“The babies,” she says.
“Leigh has them. They’re fine.”
“I know. I just…” She looks at me. “I’ve never been away from them overnight.”
“Do you want to go back?”
She considers this honestly, which is what I’ve come to expect from her. “No. I want to call and check in, and then I want to stay.”
Leigh’s voice comes through the phone bright and entirely unbothered. All three sleeping, everything fine, she is watching something on television and eating my biscuits, which she says is not technically stealing. Sage tells her that it is technically stealing and hangs up, and I watch the tension in her shoulders release fully for the first time all evening.
“Better?”
“Yeah,” she agrees, and settles back against me, and I reach over and turn off the lamp. The perfect end to the perfect date.
But then morning comes.
I wake before she does and lie still for a while in the gray early light, which is something I haven’t done in longer than I can precisely recall. She is asleep with the absolute conviction of someone who has been running on minimal sleep for two months and has finally found a safe place to properly stop, and I don’t wake her. I make coffee quietly and stand at the windowand look at the city and feel something so uncomplicated I almost don’t recognize it.
Content. I feel content. I’m standing in my kitchen in the morning, and I am content in a way that has nothing to do with achievement, productivity, or the management of difficult situations. It is, I find, an excellent feeling.
Things have finally come together in a way I want them to be. Forever.
She appears eventually, in one of my shirts which she has apparently decided is hers now, and sits at the kitchen counter with her coffee and looks out at the city with the particular quality of stillness she gets when she’s thinking something she hasn’t decided to say yet.
I give her the space. I make eggs. I know how she likes them.
Eventually, she says, “Your place is very quiet.”
“Yes. It is.”
“Does that bother you?”
“The quiet never bothered me until I knew what joy the noise could be.”
“What do you mean?”
I set down the spatula and look at her directly. “My flat is missing something it should have. Stay. Not just today. Move in. Bring the babies and Bossy’s commentary, Boy’s surveillance operation, and Baldy’s philosophical ceiling investigations. I want to wake up next to you. I want our family in one place rather than halfway across the city. Stay.”
Sage looks at me for a long moment. “Okay.”
I turn back to the eggs before she can see me smile like an absolute fool. I’ve taken a long and winding path to end up at exactly the right place. I intend to stay here as long as I can.
27
SAGE
Moving in with someone,it turns out, is a moderately complex logistical exercise under normal circumstances. Moving in with someone while also moving three infants, a triple stroller, a changing station, seventy muslin cloths, a white noise machine, bouncers, a baby monitor, and approximately eighty pounds of diapers, is a logistical exercise that makes the D-Day planning look casual.
Thank God Ronan hired movers.
He is extremely helpful and extremely in my way simultaneously, which I tell him, and he accepts this with the dignified composure of a man who knows it is accurate. He assembles the new cribs with focused competence, reading the instructions all the way through before he starts.
