Why does a friendship breakup hurt worse than the regular kind?
Maybe I was never really invested in the men I dated. I didn’t care, so it didn’t hurt that bad. It never hurt like this.
The trust we had, the lies she told. They keep replaying in my mind on a loop. How many lies? How many times had they laughed behind my back? Or was it guilt-ridden? Were they bragging about it someplace?
Was I just a joke to both of them?
Part of me wants to ask, but that would mean talking to them, and fuck that. I can’t… How am I supposed to get past this?
When I get home, Ronan is there with a bottle of the good stuff, two open arms, and three sleeping babies, he assures me. And I break down. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop.
30
RONAN
After she gathers herself together,Sage tells me the highlights of her breakup with Leigh. That’s what she calls it. Not sure it qualifies, but who am I to judge?
She’s standing at the kitchen table with her coat still on, and she is very controlled about it now, which is its own kind of telling. Sage in full feeling is warm and direct and present. But now, her tone is flat, her edges are sharp.
I have seen this once before, when she talked about her mother, and I know enough to know this is not the absence of pain. This is pain being handled with both hands, and if she doesn’t let it out more, it will eat at her.
But I don’t push. I pour whiskey she doesn’t drink. I sit across from her while she looks at the table and works through whatever she’s working through, and I stay available without making myself an obstacle.
After a while, she adds, “She mentioned something crazy, at one point. At least, I thought of it as crazy at the time, because forme, it came out of left field. For her… it’s been on her mind for a long time.”
“What’s that?”
“She said that her hope, before everything went sideways, was that we could all be together. Me, her, and Connor. The three of us. That someday it might become a throuple.”
I look at her. There must be dozens of questions on my face.
“That was apparently the plan. Eventually. I mean, Connor always had a set on him, but I’m pretty sure Leigh’s balls must be bigger for bringing that up when I was furious with her. I wonder whether she thought that fury could turn into passion or something twisted like that. Who knows? I mean, if things had been handled better, maybe eventually, but the way it stands, she’s out of her mind.”
I sit with that. I’m fifty-two years old, and I have lived what I would describe as a varied life, and I am not, as a rule, easily unsettled. As a doctor, I have trained not to let unusual personal relationships flummox me—I keep a level head no matter the circumstances.
But something moves in me at this. Something that is not quite jealousy and not quite insecurity, but in that neighborhood, making itself known with more urgency than I would like.
She is twenty-six now. That is the thing I keep returning to, not as a fact about her but as a fact about time. About the years ahead of her, the people she will meet, the ways she will grow and change in directions I cannot predict.
I am fifty-two. I have done most of my growing. I am, more or less, the man I will be, and she’s still becoming whoever sheis going to be, and those two things can coexist beautifully, or they can create a slow, irrecoverable drift, and I have no way of knowing which it will be.
I cannot make myself younger or make her older or collapse the gap between us, and I do not want to. It is part of what we are, part of what brought us together on that plane, part of the specific texture of this particular life. It is a good life, and I love it every day.
What I can do is show up. Be present. Be the man she chose and keep being him, every day, rather than spending the days anticipating the moment she might choose otherwise.
The age gap. Sage has never once made me feel diminished in any way, and I have tried to extend the same courtesy to myself. But sitting here now, listening to her describe a plan that involved her ex-boyfriend—my son—and her (former?) best friend and herself, I am aware of her age and the way she moves through a world that contains so many options. I am fifty-two, and the math of that is not always easy to look at directly.
“That’s—” I stop. Choose my words. “That’s not something you are interested in.”
“Obviously not. They built it on lies, and I’m not stupid. Even if I wasn’t with you, I wouldn’t walk into that situation.”
“But in the abstract,” I say. And then, because I apparently cannot stop from pushing the matter, “If it hadn’t been built on lies. If the circumstances had been different. Is that something you’d want?”
She looks at me. Something shifts in her expression. Not anger yet, but the approach of it. “What?”
“What I’m saying is that you’re half my age, and you could have any?—”
“Stop.” Her voice is quiet and exact. “Stop right there.”
