Chapter 178: The Restaurant He Shouldn't Have Chosen

Chapter 178: The Restaurant He Shouldn't Have Chosen
Chapter 178: The Restaurant He Shouldn't Have Chosen

ANNA SERRANO

Hermione's door was slightly ajar. I knocked twice and pushed it open.

She was curled up on her bed with her iPad propped against a pillow, fully absorbed, cartoon sounds drifting out from the speaker. Six years old and already she had perfected the art of being entirely elsewhere while technically present in a room. I smiled in spite of myself.

"Baby," I called.

Her head snapped up and her whole face rearranged itself into delight the way only a child's can, instantaneous, total, unguarded. "Mom!" She scrambled upright, iPad forgotten. Then her eyes traveled over me the way children do, blunt and observant. "Are you going somewhere?"

"Just for a little while." I crossed the room and crouched slightly to her level. "Your nanny will be with you, okay? Make sure you eat whatever she prepares. And I need you in bed at a reasonable hour — don't negotiate with her, Hermione, I mean it."

She gave me the look. The one that said she was already composing her negotiation strategy.

"I'll be back before it gets too late," I added. "It's just a business associate. Nothing that should take long."

Business associate. That was what I had decided Abel was in the context of conversations I didn't want to have. Technically inaccurate, I had already extracted him from my professional life as cleanly as I had extracted him from my personal one. But business associate was tidy. It required no elaboration. It closed doors before anyone could think to open them.

Hermione's expression shifted. Something changed behind her eyes, a thought connecting to another thought, and then her face fell in that particular way that made my stomach drop a full second before she spoke.

"But Mom." Her voice went small. "You said we were doing movie night tonight. You said…”

The silence that followed was the specific silence of a woman who has been caught.

I had forgotten. Completely, thoroughly forgotten. The movie night I had promised her two days ago, the one she had been mentioning in small ways ever since — what snacks are we getting, Mom? Can we watch two movies or just one? — had simply vacated my mind the moment Abel's package arrived and everything got complicated.

"I didn't forget," I said, and the smile I put on was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Hermione looked at me with the clear, uncluttered perception of a child who has not yet learned to be polite about what she sees.

"Mom."

"Tomorrow," I said, pulling her into my arms and pressing a firm kiss to her cheek. "I promise. Tomorrow night, full movie night, you pick everything. I'm sorry, my love."

She was quiet for a moment against my shoulder. Then she pulled back and looked at me with a gravity that occasionally reminded me she was my child through and through.

"Okay," she said. "Be safe."

"Always." I kissed her once more and set her back, then walked out before the guilt could fully settle.

\---

Alexander was in the living room when I came downstairs, and the look he gave me as I appeared on the last step was the kind that came with a question attached.

"Going somewhere?"

"Business." I said it the same way I'd said it to Hermione. Smooth. Final. Don't. "I won't be long."

He nodded and looked back at whatever he was doing, and I appreciated that he left it there.

Outside, the evening air was cool against my arms as I got into the car. Abel had sent the address in a message earlier — brief, just the location and a time, nothing attached to it. I hadn't looked at it properly when I pasted it into the GPS. I was already somewhere else in my head by then, already going back and forth about whether I was making a mistake, and so I simply let the navigation load and started driving.

Thirty minutes. The route was clean and unhurried, and I used the time to talk myself into a version of composure. This was one conversation. A single, bounded exchange with clear edges. I would hear whatever he had to say, I would respond as I saw fit, and then I would leave and come home and watch a movie with my daughter tomorrow and continue building the life I had been carefully constructing without him in it.

Simple.

I could do simple.

And then the car slowed as the GPS announced my destination, and I looked up, and the composure I had spent thirty minutes assembling simply left.

I knew this place.

Not in the abstract way you recognize a familiar building type or a neighbourhood you've passed through before. I knew it the way you know a scar — not because you look at it constantly, but because it's yours, and your body remembers it without asking your permission.

This restaurant.

This specific restaurant.

The low lighting. The modest signage. The kind of place that didn't advertise itself, that relied on discretion as part of its appeal. I had been here more times than I could count during the marriage, always in the evening, always arriving separately, always sitting in the corner booth he preferred because it faced away from the entrance.

Because Abel Donovan had been very invested, during our years together, in ensuring that as few people as possible knew he had a wife.

Not a girlfriend. A wife. And he had still managed to keep her hidden like something he was faintly embarrassed to own. Our marriage had existed behind closed doors and lowered voices and this restaurant had been one of the few places we went together, not as a couple, not openly, but tucked away in our corner where no one who mattered to him would ever see.

He had loved it here. I had tolerated it because I had loved him.

And now he had sent me back to it.

I sat in my car with both hands resting on the steering wheel and felt the old hurt move through me, not sharp like it once was, but present. A dull ache in a place that had mostly healed. I thought about the GPS and the way I'd pasted the address without looking, and I wondered if that was deliberate. If he had counted on me doing exactly that.

My hand found the ignition.

Turn around, said the part of me with the most self-preservation. He doesn't get to bring you back here. Not to this place. Not like this.

And I nearly did.

I had the intention fully formed. The decision made. I was already constructing the message I would send him — brief, cool, no explanation required —

And then the restaurant door opened.

He stepped out onto the pavement. Abel. His eyes swept the street with an immediacy that told me he'd been watching for a while, checking, hoping. He stood there for a moment in the evening air — and even from inside the car, even at this distance, I could see something in his posture that I hadn't expected.

Not arrogance. Not the careful composure he used to wear like armour in public.

Something quieter. Something smaller.

He turned and walked back inside when he didn't see what he was looking for.

I sat with the ache in my chest and the engine off and the evening pressing in around the car.

Let's get this over with, I told myself. That was all. Not forgiveness, not reconciliation, not anything that resembled opening a door I had spent a long time closing. Just closure, if it even came to that. Just the end of the back-and-forth. Just a conversation with a full stop at the end of it.

I picked up my clutch, pushed the car door open, and stepped into the evening.

My heels were steady on the pavement as I walked toward the entrance.

Whatever was waiting inside, I would handle it.

I always did.