I learned Theo taught high school physics. Bridget managed a nonprofit that helped families navigate fertility treatment costs, an irony none of us mentioned out loud but all of us clearly noticed.
“I started it after our second loss,” Bridget told me, catching me studying her face when she mentioned it. “Figured if I couldn’t fix my own situation, I could at least make someone else’s a little less financially impossible.”
“That’s a generous way to handle grief,” I said.
“Or a stubborn one,” she said. “Depends who you ask.”
I laughed at that, surprised by how easily laughter had started finding its way back into these visits.
Before I left, Bridget hugged me at the door, Iris asleep against her shoulder.
“Come back anytime,” she said. “I mean that.”
I did come back, more times than I originally expected to.
Over the following months, my visits to the Kavanagh house became something closer to routine, Sunday afternoons that slowly stopped feeling strange and started feeling like a new kind of ordinary. Theo taught me to make his grandmother’s arroz con pollo one visit, both of us laughing at how badly I burned the first batch. Bridget and I traded parenting stories from decades apart, her exhausted first-year questions meeting my worn, practical answers from raising Marcus and Delphine.
“You’re basically a built-in grandmother,” Theo joked once. “Minus the actual grandmother part.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. “Titles were never really the point anyway.”
My relationship with Paige took longer to rebuild.
We met for coffee a month after the birth, both of us careful with each other in a way we’d never been before, thirty-nine years of sisterhood suddenly needing new rules neither of us had written yet.
The first two weeks after the hospital, we barely spoke at all, both of us caught in our own separate versions of processing what had happened, neither ready to be the one who called first.
Marcus called me the week before that coffee meeting, worried in the particular way adult children get worried about their parents, careful not to overstep but clearly needing to say something.
“You sound different,” he told me over the phone. “Since the hospital thing. Are you actually okay, or just telling everyone you’re okay?”
“Somewhere in between,” I admitted. “I’m getting there.”
“Aunt Paige called me,” Marcus said. “Apologized for how she acted. Said she wanted my opinion on how to fix things with you.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That you don’t fix forty years with one conversation,” he said. “But that you’d probably let her try anyway, because that’s just who you are.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I hung up that call feeling steadier than I had in days, grateful for a son who knew exactly how to say the right thing without making it feel like a lecture.
Delphine had a different reaction entirely, less patient, more protective.
