Her voice slips quiet. “I thought he had a right to know. I’m sorry, Sage.”
I look at her. Leigh, who built me two websites while I was too nauseated to work, who brought me plain toast at ten at night without being asked, who sat on my bathroom floor with me at two in the morning when the pregnancy felt like too much, and talked me through it until I could breathe again. Leigh, who made a bad call and is standing here owning it without excuses, which is more than most people manage.
I can respect that last part. But the rest of it is too much for me to handle right now.
“Okay.”
She exhales. “Do you need anything before I go?”
“No. I’m going to sleep when they sleep, which according to every book is the only strategy that works, and they’re starting to doze off.”
She squeezes my arm on her way out, and I lock the door behind her and stand in my cottage alone for the first time in… I don’t even know how long. Months, possibly. There is always someone around when you’re very pregnant and then when you’ve just given birth, always a nurse or a visitor or a well-meaning person with an opinion about your body and your choices and your future.
Right now, there’s just me and three sleeping babies and the particular, specific silence of a house that knows everything has changed.
I stand in the doorway of my own bedroom, which is no longer just my bedroom but also a nursery, and I look at the cribs Leigh has arranged along the far wall with the care of someone who loves me and wanted to do something tangible with that love, and I let myself feel the full weight of where I am.
I am twenty-six years old. I have half a degree, a fitness business, and a cottage with good light and a landlord who lets me paint the walls. I have no partner and no co-parent lined up and no roadmap for what comes next, and I have three human beings who are entirely dependent on me to figure it out.
Yes, Ronan is around, but at what capacity? I have no idea. The way he makes it sound, he wasn’t around much for Connor, so why should I expect more than that?
I have felt afraid before. I know what fear feels like in my body. Tight across the chest, fast in the hands, that specific vertigo of ground that used to be solid deciding to shift.
What I’m feeling right now is different. It is not the absence of fear, exactly. It’s something heavier and stiller and more permanent than fear. It’s the knowledge that I would do absolutely anything for these three people I have known for less than two days, and that this knowledge is not going anywhere.
I sit on the edge of my bed and look at them. All three in a row, breathing in the reliable, faintly audible way of new humans who have not yet learned to be quiet about it. Two girls and a boy. My chest does something that I don’t have a name for yet. It’s something that isn’t quite love, because love is too small a word, but is in that direction, enormous and unconditional and slightly terrifying.
“Okay,” I tell them softly. “Time for sleep?” They yawn in different intervals, and I find myself joining them.
I haven’t slept for long when someone knocks on the door. When I open it, Connor is standing on my front step with his arms full of shopping bags. He looks different from the hospital. Less raw. His jaw is set. Shoulders back.
“What are you?—”
“I don’t want to fight,” he says immediately. “I just want to help.”
Hence, the bags. Despite myself, I clock what’s in them. A proper baby monitor, the expensive kind with a camera. A subscription box of diapers in three sizes. A meal delivery service gift card. Practical things. Useful things. Not the grand romantic gesture kind of things.
I am too tired to turn away practical and useful. “Fine,” I say, and stand aside.
He brings everything in and sets it down in the kitchen without being asked to and doesn’t try to see the babies, which earns him marginal credit. I make tea while he arranges it all. We sit at my kitchen table. He wraps both hands around his mug and looks at me with an expression I recognize. The one he gets when he’s about to say something he has rehearsed.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says.
“Connor—”
“Just let me say it.” He meets my eyes. “These past few months, watching your content, seeing you do all of this on your own… I’ve been an idiot. I know that. And whatever you say about the babies, I know what I felt when I thought they were mine, and Idon’t want to lose that. I want to do this properly. I want to be here.”
He puts a ring box on the table.
I stare at it for a long moment. It’s a nice box. Velvet, navy blue, the kind from an actual jeweler rather than a mall chain.
“Are you high?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, without missing a beat. “But I bought the ring sober, and I mean every word sober, and I’ll ask you again in the morning if that helps.”
I almost laugh. Almost. He’s being as sincere as he can manage, so I don’t. But I have to be clear. “Connor. The babies aren’t yours.”
“You slept with someone else—you made that clear enough when you said it the first time. But, baby, you forgave me when I cheated, and I forgive you too?—”