Chapter 277 Anger

Chapter 277 Anger
Ryder's POV

Tommy was not done.

I should have known that. One punch was not Tommy's idea of making a point. One punch was Tommy's opening statement.

"You know what your problem is?" Tommy asked.

He was still standing between me and the bar, coffee forgotten behind him.

"Tommy—"

"No." He was not raising his voice. That was almost worse. "I punched you. Now you listen."

I listened.

"Your problem," Tommy said, "is that you have spent fifteen years being the most controlled man in every room. The man who never loses his head. The man who stays calm when everyone else is falling apart. The man who thinks before he speaks, who measures before he acts, who never does anything without knowing why he's doing it." He looked at me. "And you have been so busy being that man that you forgot to be a human being who trusts the person he loves."

"That is not what this was," I said.

"That is exactly what this was," Tommy replied. "You trusted your brain over your heart. You let a random thought become a calculation and you let the calculation take over your entire thinking. And then you brought it to the table as a question you had no right to ask."

"I was being honest," I said.

"You were being a coward," Tommy said.

That hit harder than his fist had.

"Honesty should have meant going to her before your brain built something stupid out of nothing," Tommy said. "Honest would have been saying Sage, I'm having a thought I don't want to be having, help me get rid of it. That is honest. What you did was sit with a doubt until it became a question and then ask the question at the kitchen table the day after your engagement like she owed you an alibi."

I had nothing to say to that.

"Do you have any idea," Tommy said, "what that woman has been through in the past few months? Not just with Bradley. With everything. She watched Jaxon nearly die. She went to Arizona like she was sold off and came back. She dealt with Bradley's charges, his threats, his fake stories, his secret wife. She stood in a coffee shop and poured a drink over a man's head in front of a room full of strangers." He looked at me. "She did all of that and she came home to you every time. She chose you every time. And you woke up this morning and chose to doubt her."

"I know what she's been through," I said.

"Clearly you don't," Tommy said. "Because if you did, you would understand that asking her when exactly she got pregnant, in that tone, with that expression on your face, is one of the cruelest things you could have done to her."

"I did not intend to be cruel," I said.

"Intent doesn't change impact," Tommy said. "You know that. You've told brothers that. You've sat at the head of that table and told prospects a man is judged by what he does, not what he meant to do. And what you did this morning was sit across from your pregnant fiancée and wonder if the baby was someone else's."

He was not wrong about any of it.

"She is pregnant," Tommy said, and the weight of the words in his mouth made them sound different from the kitchen. "She is pregnant and she is terrified and she spent days carrying that information alone because of what Bradley did to her. She came home last night and trusted you with it and you responded by doing math." He looked at me. "What is wrong with you?"

"I don't know," I said.

"That's not good enough," Tommy said. "I don't know doesn't help Sage. I don't know doesn't fix what you broke this morning. I don't know is a non-answer from a man who is very good at having answers."

"Then what do you want me to say?" I asked.

"I want you to tell me you understand that you may have just lost her," Tommy said. "Not damaged things. Not set them back. Completely lost her. And that you are going to spend every minute of however long it takes doing whatever it takes to give her a reason to let you back in."

"She told me to get out and not come back," I said.

"I guessed as much," Tommy said. "And you should have done it faster."

I looked at him.

"She needed you gone," Tommy continued. "She asked you to leave. The fact that you tried to keep talking after she said that tells me you still thought you could manage your way out of it. You cannot manage your way out of this one, Ryder. There is no version of this where you say the right thing fast enough and it disappears."

"I know that," I said.

"Do you?" Tommy asked. "Because you have managed your way out of everything for years and your default is to manage. I am telling you that is the wrong approach here."

The left side of my face was throbbing. The brothers at the far end of the room had gone back to their phones, working very hard at looking like they were not listening.

I sat on the stool.

Tommy sat back down too.

"She's going to call Jaxon," Tommy said, after a moment. His voice had come down. The anger had cleared out, and what was underneath it was something quieter and more worried.

I had not thought of that. Of course she would call Jaxon. Jaxon was the first call she made when anything happened. He was the person she went to when the world shifted on her. And I had just shifted it.

"When she does," Tommy said, "and he calls you, do not try to defend your foolish actions then."

"I know," I said.

"Good," Tommy said. "Because Jaxon Romano is not going to punch you in the face."

He picked up his coffee.

"He's going to be considerably worse than that," Tommy said.