One day, we’ll give them proper names. We’re still mulling them over. As Sage says, it’s an important decision that shouldn’t be made lightly. She says this because she and her sister hate their names. I think they’re lovely, but I didn’t have to grow up with them.
I answer Mary’s call quietly, shifting Boy slightly so he doesn’t wake.
“Ronan.” Mary’s voice has the particular energy it gets when she’s about to tell me something she finds either delightful or disastrous. Over the years of siblinghood, I have learned to distinguish between the two. This is, I think, delightful, but witha complication underneath it. “I’ve been putting together the parade archive for the website. Last year’s photos.”
“Right.” Her annual project for the city.
“I’ve got a lovely set from the crowd celebration. Very good turnout this year.” A pause. “As it turns out, Connor’s in several of them.”
I’m quiet for a moment. Connor told me he couldn’t make the Galway celebration last year. Used his girlfriend at the time—Sage—as an excuse. I had accepted it with the ease of a man who has learned not to push Connor on these things, which is to say I had accepted it with the ease of a man who has been making excuses for his own absence for so long that he’s extended the same courtesy to his son.
“Oh?”
“He is. Quite prominently in a few of them.” Another pause, more deliberate. “With a woman I don’t recognize.”
I sit with that for a moment. Boy shifts on my chest and resettles without waking, and I run a hand down his back automatically, the way I have learned to do this. No time like the present to clear some things up. “On that subject,” I say carefully, “the brunette in the photos with Connor?—”
“Hmm?”
“She’s now my girlfriend. Currently. She’s moved in.”
A silence that is, even by Mary’s standards, extremely loaded. “She’s… Ronan. The woman in the photos with Connor?—”
“His ex-girlfriend now, yes. It’s a longer story than a phone call can hold. The short version is that they had just broken up, sheand I met before I knew who she was to him, and there are now three babies in my sitting room.”
“Three—”
“Triplets. Two girls and a boy.”
Another silence. I can hear Mary processing this with the particular, industrious quality she brings to unexpected information. Not shocked exactly, but recalibrating, fitting the new shape of things into the existing architecture of her understanding of my life.
“Right,” she says finally. “That is a longer story. How is it you keep ending up with surprise babies?”
I laugh hard enough to disturb Boy, but he settles back down fast. “Good sperm, I suppose.”
“Forget I asked. And Connor, he knows? About you and this woman?”
“He does. We’ve talked. It’s been difficult, and it’s ongoing, but we’re in better shape than we were.” I pause. “He came to me. Voluntarily. That’s new.”
“I’m glad,” Mary says, simply and warmly, the way she says things she means without ceremony. “I want to hear all of it when there’s time. But Ronan, about these photos?—”
“Send them.”
“I’m sending them now.”
My phone buzzes against my ear. I pull it away and look at the images she’s sent, holding Boy against my shoulder with the other arm in the way that has become entirely automatic in the past seven weeks.
Quietly, she says, “That’s not a brunette in the pictures.”
I scan them quickly, searching for Connor. The photographs are bright and crowded, the particular chaos of the Galway parade. Green everything, the street full of people, the familiar landmarks of the city I grew up in and left and still dream about with a frequency I don’t always admit. And there, in the third photograph, unmistakably, standing in the crowd with a pint of Guinness and the easy, unselfconscious grin he only gets in Galway, is Connor.
With a woman beside him. Blond hair in braids, brown eyes, laughing at something, his arm around her shoulders.
Leigh.
I look at the photograph for a long moment. I think about Sage telling me that Leigh had confessed to months of phone calls and to a connection she hadn’t known how to tell Sage about. The closeness Leigh had with Sage throughout the pregnancy. The terrible position she’d been in and the imperfect way she’d navigated it.
I am angry on Sage’s behalf.
