It’s a practice I find both admirable and deeply personally incompatible with my entire approach to life. I read instructions as a last resort, after three failed attempts have made it unavoidable.
We compromise. He assembles while I hand him parts and offer commentary that he describes as unhelpful and I describe as motivating. At one point, he hands me the instructions and asks me to read step seven. It turns out step seven is important, and I concede this point, as much as I hate to admit it.
He says nothing. He simply looks at me with that dry, measured expression, and that is somehow worse.
The penthouse is different with us in it. With the babies in it, I mean.
It’s still beautiful. All those clean lines and floor-to-ceiling windows and the bookshelves that run the length of one wall, which I have started reading my way along with the focus of someone who has discovered she has better taste in reading material when she has access to a well-curated library. But the whole place has acquired a new layer.
A layer of baby culture.
The warm, organized chaos of three infants who do not care about clean lines. Muslins on the kitchen counter and a baby monitor next to the espresso machine and the triple stroller in the hallway that Ronan steps around without complaint.
He has adapted with a completeness I did not entirely predict, though I probably should have. Ronan is not a man who does things by halves. He is up at night without being asked, taking the early shift so I can sleep past five for the first time in weeks. He’s been researching pediatric milestones and asking questions at appointments that have made our pediatrician smile and say she wishes all her parents were this prepared. He’s good at this, as he is at everything—thoroughly and without a doubt.
“You’re still sure about this,” I say, on the third day, when I find him standing in the kitchen at six in the morning with Bossy on his shoulder and a cup of tea going cold on the counter.
“Completely,” he says, without looking up.
“She woke you up.”
“She woke everyone up. I got to her first.” He glances at me sideways. “Go back to sleep, Sage.”
I do not go back to sleep. Can’t. I make tea for us both and lean against the counter and watch him walk the slow circuit of the kitchen with our daughter. I moved in with a man two days after our first official date, and it feels like the most natural thing I’ve ever done, and I’m not sure what that says about me except that maybe instincts are worth listening to.
His twins come on a Sunday, three weeks after we moved in.
Ronan tells me they’re coming with the low-key energy of someone who is not low-key about it at all. He mentions it Tuesday, reminds me Thursday, and on Sunday morning reorganizes the kitchen twice, which he will not admit is because he’s nervous. I find this endearing to a degree I do not tell him about directly.
“They’re going to like you,” he says, over breakfast.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know my daughters.”
Myrna arrives first. She is tall and dark and dressed entirely in black, and she comes through the door and looks at me with her father’s dark eyes and says, with complete directness. “You’re younger than I expected. No offense.”
“None taken,” I say. “You’re more intimidating than I expected. No offense.”
She grins then, and I think we’re going to get along well.
Orla arrives seven minutes later in all white with a camera bag over her shoulder and silver jewelry stacked to her elbow and a cloud of dark curls that makes my own hair feel inadequate by comparison. She stops in the doorway, looks at me, looks at her father, looks back at me, and says, “Oh, Dad. She’s lovely.”
Ronan makes a sound I have never heard from him before, something between clearing his throat and genuine embarrassment, and I have to work hard not to laugh.
“Hi,” I say to Orla. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“All true, probably,” she says cheerfully, and comes in and kisses her father’s cheek and goes directly to the babies.
The next two hours are, unexpectedly, among the most enjoyable I’ve had since before the birth. Myrna holds Bossy with the careful, slightly wondering attention of someone encountering something small and consequential, turning her this way and that like she’s deciding how she’d paint her. Orla takes seventeen photographs of Boy before he’s been awake for five minutes, then shows them to me on her camera screen. They’re extraordinary. Something in them catches the particular quality of his gaze, that patient, interior watchfulness, in a way I haven’t seen in any of the photos I’ve taken myself.
“Can I have that one?” I ask.
“I’ll send you a set,” she says, already moving toward Baldy. “Oh. Oh, she’s got the fuzz starting.”
“She’s very proud of it,” I say.
“She should be. Dad, look at this child.”
