Her face tightens, guilt flashing across it as she reaches for his arm. “Connor, come on,” she says gently. “Let’s give her a minute?—”
He doesn’t move. The babies keep crying. My head starts pounding.
I swear to God, if he doesn’t leave in the next five seconds, I might actually lose what little sanity I have left. The crying drills straight into my bones. How the hell am I going to do this?
My entire body tenses, instinct kicking in even through the exhaustion, even through the fog that hasn’t fully lifted since I woke up. “Connor,” I say, my voice lower now but no less sharp. “You’re scaring my children. Leave.”
“I’m not—” he starts, his voice still tight, still edged with something that feels a little too close to anger.
“They’re crying,” I cut in, because I don’t have the patience to argue logic right now. “So yes. You are. Go.”
Leigh steps in again, more firmly this time, her hand tightening around his arm. “Connor, come on. Let’s step out. Just for a minute.”
“This isn’t over,” he says.
I almost laugh. “Yeah,” I say dryly. “No kidding.”
Leigh doesn’t give him time to argue again. She nudges him toward the door, guiding him out with a mix of gentle persistence and barely contained urgency. “I’ll be right back?—”
“Don’t rush.” I almost tell her not to bother coming back. But I want to know what the hell she was thinking by bringing him here.
The door closes behind them. The silence doesn’t come with it. The babies are still crying.
“Hey,” I murmur, lifting one of them into my arms. “Hey, it’s okay.”
We are not okay. But we’re going to pretend we are.
One of the other babies quiets a little, the sound tapering off into softer, uneven breaths, and I cling to that like it’s a major victory.
“See?” I mutter. “We’re getting there.” I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince. Probably myself.
Slowly, the room settles. The cries fade into smaller sounds, then into quiet, then into the soft, steady rhythm of breathing that I’m starting to recognize as normal.
I sag back into the pillows, one baby still tucked against me, my entire body humming with exhaustion all over again. “That was a disaster.”
And this is only the beginning.
14
RONAN
I am not,by nature, a man who loses sleep over things he cannot control. I have developed, over the course of a long career and a longer life, a reasonably effective method of filing the unresolvable into a mental drawer and leaving it there until such time as it becomes resolvable. It is a skill, like any other. One cultivates it or one does not, and I cultivated it out of sheer necessity somewhere around my second year of residency, when the alternative was a collapse I could not afford.
The drawer is, at present, very full.
I lie on the vinyl couch in the attending lounge until five thirty, at which point I concede the point to wakefulness, drink two cups of coffee that do not taste of anything in particular, and begin my rounds forty minutes earlier than strictly necessary. This is, I tell myself, simply good practice. Diligence. There is nothing unusual about a physician arriving early.
I don’t examine this reasoning too closely.
Rounds proceed normally. I am, if anything, somewhat more focused than usual—the particular clarity that comes with sleepdeprivation before the exhaustion sets in, a state I remember well from residency and have not missed. My registrar, a sharp young woman named Dr. Adeyemi who I suspect will be running her own department within a decade, keeps pace without complaint and asks precisely the right questions at precisely the right moments. I find her reassuring in the way that competent people generally are.
I check in on two post-operative patients, both progressing well. I review a set of imaging results that have been waiting since yesterday and dictate my notes with what I consider to be admirable efficiency, given the circumstances. I return three phone calls. I am, in every measurable sense, a man conducting a normal morning at work.
I think about Sage approximately every four minutes.
This is not a precise figure. It’s an estimate based on the number of times I catch myself pausing mid-thought between tasks, staring at something without seeing it, and then locating the cause of the distraction and setting it aside again. The intervals are consistent enough to be notable. I have not thought about a woman with this frequency since—well. Since Aoifa, early on, when everything was still new and the future had not yet acquired its particular shape.
I don’t dwell on that comparison. It’s too early for comparisons of that weight, and I am not a man who rushes toward conclusions without sufficient evidence.