I nod. “That’s when it happened.”
“Hot.”
I snort. “Yeah. Well, hotness has consequences.” I jut my chin toward the babies.
“It does. Were you embarrassed or something?”
The shrug is involuntary. “I guess. I think I was judging myself for it, and I worried you would too.”
“For the record, I don’t. You were just dumped, and we all do stupid shit when that happens.” She lets out a breath. “So we’re all right?”
Three years of friendship. Three years of bathroom floors at two in the morning and plain toast at ten at night and two websites built with care and precision while I was too hormonal to form coherent sentences and the years before that, being my support and me being there for her too. Leigh, who is imperfect and occasionally overreaching and fundamentally, genuinely mine.
“We’re working on it. Which is as good as I can do right now.”
She accepts this with a weak smile, and we eat our pastries, and the babies cycle through their needs in rotation. Feed, change, walk, repeat. The day passes the way days pass when you are too tired and too full of feeling to track the hours properly.
Leigh holds the girls while I feed the boy, then holds the boy while I feed the girls in sequence. She changes diapers without being asked, which earns her significant credit, and she does it with the cheerful competence of someone who has been waiting her whole life for an excuse to do exactly this.
It loosens my knot of Leigh-shaped frustration.
This is the Leigh I know. The one who shows up and does the practical thing and loves me and the people adjacent to me with a fullness that occasionally overflows its banks in ways that cause problems. She’s not a bad person. She made a bad call. That’s all it was.
This is the first time Leigh has let me down in any meaningful way. And I’m discovering that one real failure, owned cleanly and without deflection, sits differently than I expected it to. It doesn’t erase our friendship. It complicates things, adds texture, makes the friendship something more than frictionless. Real, maybe, in a way that frictionless things aren’t.
Forgiveness has never been my strong suit. Usually, I just move on. Growing up with my mom, I never got an apology. Rosemary never did anything worth forgiving, and Mom didn’t care if she did or not. I haven’t had a lot of close girlfriends, given my hobbies—weightlifting, mostly—and going into my field left me without a ton of female interaction except for clients. And you don’t keep clients by calling them out on their bullshit all the time.
So, I’m not good at forgiving Leigh. But I want to.
She leaves around four, and the cottage goes quiet again in that way I’m starting to recognize—heavy and soft and full of small sounds that resolve into something that feels, against all expectation, like peace. I get all three babies down at something approaching the same time, which feels like a victory of such magnitude that I sit on the edge of my bed and do nothing for a full two minutes just to honor it.
Then I pick up my phone and look at Ronan’s text.Thinking of you all.
I write back,All alive. Barely. How do people do this with just one?
His response comes back within a minute.Considerable denial and a great deal of tea. Get some sleep.
I put the phone down, and I’m smiling, which feels both entirely natural and completely absurd given everything. I lie down in the dark and listen to three small people breathe and think about the results coming. And about Ronan tucking that curl behind my ear in the doorway like it was the most natural thing in the world.
And the kiss.
He does things without making a production of them. Just picks up a crying baby, just makes eggs in top hats, just reaches out and moves a piece of hair out of my face because apparently it was bothering him and he intended to do something about it. No preamble. No fuss. Just the quiet confidence of a man who has made a decision and is acting on it, and the warmth of his fingers against my temple, and the way he looked at me in the doorway afterward, like he was very deliberately not pushing further.
So, I did. Couldn’t help it. And even though he left after we kissed, I didn’t feel left. I felt seen. Held. Dare I say, I felt happy.
That thought drifts behind my eyes, and I doze off, safe in the knowledge that I can be happy again. One day.
20
RONAN
I have,over the course of my career, received results that changed everything. A scan that confirmed what a family feared. A test that ruled out what a patient dreaded. Results that arrived too late and results that arrived with time to spare, and all the emotional weight each of those categories carries.
I understand results. I understand what it means to wait for them and what it means to receive them and how the certainty of an outcome does nothing to soften the moment of its delivery.
I am, nonetheless, awake at five forty-five in the morning, which I attribute entirely to professional habit and not at all to the fact that Sage’s text last night is sitting in my phone like a small, warm thing I keep returning to.
I shower. Make tea. Stand at the window of my penthouse and look out at the city getting on with its early morning, all gray light and low cloud and the particular stillness of Boston before it decides to be loud, and I think about my children.