Chapter 278 Worse

Chapter 278 Worse

Ryder's POV

We sat at the bar for a while after that without talking.

Not the comfortable kind of silence. The kind that came after everything had been said and what was left was just two men and the effect of it.

I held my jaw. The throbbing had settled into a steady ache that was going to be worse tomorrow. I had been hit harder before, by people considerably larger than Tommy Kane. But this one had come from a different place and it sat differently.

Tommy had called me a coward.

Not in anger. Not an insult thrown in the heat of something. He had said it clearly and he had meant it to land. Deliberate. Chosen. A coward.

I thought about it in the quiet of the bar.

A coward would have been the man who said nothing. Who smiled and kept his mouth shut and carried the doubt around and let it grow until it became resentment. I had said it out loud. I had been honest about what was in my head rather than pretending it was not there.

But Tommy was right about the part I claimed to be honest.

Real honesty would have been going to her before the doubt had time to build. Real honesty would have been to shut the thought down the moment it crossed my mind, while she was still asleep, while it was still early enough to name it out loud as a thought rather than a question. Instead I had thought about it seriously for a while and brought it to the table as a question and called that honesty.

That was not honesty. That was the coward's version. Waiting until the doubt was too large to hold and then putting it down on someone who had not done anything to earn it.

I put my head in my hands.

The brothers at the far end of the room had quietly found reasons to be somewhere else. At some point it had become just Tommy and I had not clocked the moment they left.

"She's going to be okay," Tommy said after a while. He was not asking. He was not quite reassuring either.

"I know she's going to be okay," I said. "Sage is the strongest person I know. She was okay before me and she will be okay regardless of what I do next." I kept my head in my hands. "That is not the part that's killing me."

"What is the part?" Tommy asked.

"The part that's killing me," I said, "is that I finally had everything. I had it all in one place at one time. The ring on her finger. The baby. A property to call our own. The life we were building." I looked up at him. "And I destroyed it over a thought."

Tommy said nothing.

"Six weeks," I said. "That is what I traded everything for. A six-week timeline and twenty minutes alone with my imagination and the failure to trust the woman who had given me every reason to trust her." I shook my head. "I do not deserve her."

"No," Tommy said. "You don't."

I looked at him.

"That's not an argument," Tommy said. "That's a fact. You don't deserve her right now. You did something today that you did not deserve to do to her." He looked at his coffee. "The question is not whether you deserve her. The question is whether you are going to do what it takes to earn the right to try again."

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

"And you kept talking anyway," Tommy said. "I know you"

I looked at him.

"She told you that in the immediate aftermath of the worst morning of her year," Tommy said. "That does not mean forever. It means not today. Not until she has had time to sit with it." He paused. "But Ryder. It might mean a while. You need to be ready for it to mean a while."

"I know," I said.

"And you cannot defy it," Tommy said. "You cannot show up with a plan and execute it and check the boxes. This is Sage deciding in her own time and in her own way whether what you did is something she can move past. You cannot control that."

"I know," I said.

"Good," Tommy said.

We sat.

My phone rang.

I looked at the screen.

Jaxon.

My stomach dropped harder than it had when his fist hit my face. Tommy had told me this was coming. I had heard it and filed it as likely. But seeing Jaxon Romano's name on the screen was different from knowing it was coming.

Sage had obviously called him.

She had probably sat on that kitchen floor and when she was done crying she had picked up her phone and called her brother. Not a friend from Manhattan. Jaxon. The person she went to when something was too large to hold alone. She had probably told him what I had done and now he was calling me.

I looked at the phone.

"Answer it," Tommy said quietly.

I answered it.

"Ryder." Jaxon's voice was the cold version. Not the hot kind of fury. The cold kind that was always worse, because it meant he was completely in control of what he was about to do.

"Jaxon," I said.

"Don't say a word," Jaxon said. "Just listen. I am coming to the clubhouse right now. You will be there when I arrive. And when I get there, you are going to look me in the eye and tell me what you did."

The line went dead.

I put the phone on the bar.

"How long do I have?" I asked.

Tommy checked his watch. "I guess you could say less than ten minutes, judging from the distance if the house."

I nodded.

"Ryder," Tommy said.

I looked at him.

"Don't make it worse," Tommy said. "When he gets here. Just tell him the truth."

"I know," I said.

"Good," Tommy said. He picked up his coffee again. "Because I'm sure he already knows what happened from Sage. Anything less than the truth and he will know immediately."