Chapter 276: The punch

Ryder's POV

Tommy was looking at me the way he looked at a situation he had not yet decided how to handle.

"What happened?" he asked.

I looked at the bar. Looking there was better than looking straight into Tommy's eyes. I concentrated on the familiar scratches and stains of a surface that had been in this room since before some of the younger recruites were born.

"I did something," I said.

"I can see that. Tell me what."

I told him.

I did not dress it up. There was no version of what I had done that benefited from dressing up, and Tommy would have seen through it anyway. I told him about the morning. The eggs. The timeline. The question I had asked at the table. Everything Sage had said in response. The ring box. The door.

Tommy listened without interrupting.

That was notable. Tommy interrupted everything. Tommy's natural state in a conversation was to put himself into it early and often, with observations and commentary and opinions that had not been requested. The fact that he stayed quiet through the entire thing told me he understood before I finished that this was not the kind of situation that called for commentary.

When I stopped talking, he was quiet for a moment.

I looked at him.

His jaw was tight. He was looking at the bar the same way I had been looking at it. Processing it in the order I had given it to him, the same way I had been processing it on the ride over. I watched him reach the part about the ring box because his expression changed.

"Let me make sure I understand you correctly," Tommy said.

"Okay."

"Sage told you last night she was pregnant," Tommy said.

"Yes."

"And you told her she should never have had to carry it alone," Tommy said.

"Yes."

"And you put the ring on her finger," Tommy said.

"Yes."

"And then this morning," Tommy said, "you asked her when exactly she got pregnant because you were trying to work out if it was Diego's."

I said nothing.

"That is what you did," Tommy said.

"Yes."

Tommy nodded once, slowly, in the way he nodded when he was confirming something he wished he had not confirmed.

Then he stood up off his stool.

I did not see it coming. Not because I did not know Tommy was capable of it — I had seen Tommy fight more times than I could count — but because I was not expecting it in that moment, at that speed, from that direction.

His fist connected with the left side of my face and I went off the stool and hit the floor and the floor was harder than it had any right to be at nine in the morning.

I lay there for a second.

The brothers at the far end of the room had gone completely silent.

Tommy stood over me.

"Get up," he said.

I got up. Slowly. The left side of my face was doing something that was going to be significantly worse in an hour than it was right now. I got back onto the stool and put my hand to my jaw and looked at Tommy.

He was breathing hard. Not from the punch. From what was behind it.

"You absolute idiot," Tommy said.

"I know."

"Do you?" he said. "Do you actually know? Because I am not sure you do. I am not sure you understand the full size of what you just did."

"Tommy—"

"She told you about Bradley," Tommy said. "She sat at that table last night and she told you what it cost her to say those words. She told you why she had been carrying it alone for four days. She made herself completely open to you and you said exactly the right things and she trusted you." He looked at me. "And then you woke up and questioned whether the baby was Diego's."

"I know what I did," I said.

"You know the facts of it," Tommy said. "I'm not sure you know what it means."

"Then tell me," I said.

"It means," Tommy said, "that every fear she had about saying those words to a man was proven right this morning. Not by Bradley this time. By you." He held my gaze and did not let it go. "You are the man she chose after Bradley. You are the reason she fought through everything she fought through this year. And you woke up on the morning after your engagement and proved that the person she trusted most in the world was willing to doubt her when the math felt uncertain."

I had nothing to say to that.

"She might not forgive you," Tommy said. "I need you to hear that. Not as a warning, not as a threat. As a real possibility. She might actually not forgive you for this."

"I know," I said.

"No," Tommy said. "You're saying the words but you don't look like a man who actually believes it. You look like a man who thinks this is bad but fixable. I am telling you it might not be fixable."

I looked at the bar.

I thought about the ring box on the kitchen floor. I thought about the image that had been forming in my head the whole ride over, the twelve minutes of road between me and the house, Sage probably sitting on the kitchen floor alone after the door closed.

I did not know if that was what had happened. But I knew her. And that fact was the thing that had made this morning hurt her the way it did.

She had let me know her all the way down and I had used that knowledge to doubt her.

The left side of my face ached.

Tommy sat back down on his stool and picked up his coffee.

"You're bleeding," he said.

"I know," I replied.

"Good," he said. He did not offer me a napkin.