Chapter 275: Leaving

Ryder's POV

I stood on the other side of the front door for a moment.

Not going anywhere. Just standing on the porch with the morning around me and the door closed at my back and the silence of having walked out of a conversation that I had no idea how to come back from.

I should go back in.

The thought arrived immediately and I knew immediately that it was wrong. Not because I did not want to go back in. Because Sage had asked me to leave.

She had not asked me to leave because she needed a moment to calm down and then she would be ready to talk. She had asked me to leave because she needed me gone, and going back in five seconds after the door closed would be one more thing I was doing wrong in a morning that was already full of them.

I walked to the bike.

I did not let myself look at the kitchen window. If I looked at it I would see her or I would not see her and either way it would make it harder to keep walking.

I put my helmet on. I started the bike. I sat on it for a moment with the engine running, hands on the bars, the road in front and the house behind.

I loved her.

I had told her so on my way out the door and she had said nothing and I did not blame her for saying nothing. What I had done this morning was not something that a four-word declaration fixed. It was not something that anything fixed quickly. I knew that with a certainty that sat in my chest like something cold and heavy.

I pulled out of the driveway.

The road to the clubhouse took twelve minutes from the house. I had driven it so many times over so many years that my hands knew the turns before my brain did. This morning I clocked every one of them. The left at the end of our road. The long straight past the feed store. The curve before the bridge where the river came into view. Twelve minutes of road between me and the house where Sage was probably sitting on the kitchen floor. I knew her, and that was where she would be.

I tried to go back through the morning.

Six weeks. The thought arriving. The eggs on the stove. The twenty minutes of trying to suppress something that had already grown too large to suppress. The question coming out at the table. Her face when she understood what I was really asking. The silence that said more than any of the words that came after.

The ring box on the floor.

I had done that. I had taken the morning after the best night of my life and turned it into the ring box on the floor and Sage at the kitchen table with her eyes doing the thing I had caused.

I had no one to be angry at except myself. Not Diego. Not the timeline. Not six weeks as a number. Me.

Diego had not done anything. Diego had sent her home. Diego had boundaries and principles and had behaved exactly the way I had always trusted him to behave and I had stood in the kitchen questioning it anyway.

Not because there was evidence.

Not because Sage had given me any reason. Because my brain had found a timeline and refused to let it go and I had let my brain win over everything I knew about the woman I loved.

I was an idiot.

I had been an idiot with no provocation. No evidence. No reason except a thought in my head and twenty minutes of silence at a stove. The realization was for sure.

Not the relaxed way where you acknowledged a mistake while keeping your dignity intact.

I was an idiot who had taken the morning after his engagement and the morning after finding out he was going to be a father and turned it into an accusation with no evidence behind it.

The clubhouse came into view.

I pulled into the lot. Killed the engine. Sat on the bike.

I did not want to go inside. Going inside meant facing people, and facing people meant someone reading my face.

Someone reading my face meant having to say what had happened. I did not want to say it out loud because saying it out loud was going to make it more real. It was already more real than I could hold.

But sitting in the lot on the bike was not going to fix anything either. Nobody had ever fixed anything by sitting on a bike in a car park.

I took my helmet off and went inside. I did not know what I was going to say to anyone I ran into. I had twelve minutes of riding and I had not arrived at a single thing.

The main room was quiet at this hour. A couple of brothers at the far end with their phones. The bar unstaffed. The pool table unused.

And Tommy.

Tommy was at the bar with a coffee, the same spot he had been in for most of the past month, and he looked up when I came through the door.

He took one look at my face and set his coffee down. He did not say anything yet. He was reading me the way he had been doing so for fifteen years, the way Tommy read people before he decided what to

do with what he was seeing.

"What happened?" he asked immediately I came close enough to hear him.