Chapter 289 Decisions

Chapter 289 Decisions
Sage's POV

Diego left at five.

He did not push me to decide anything before he went. He just put his coffee cup in the sink, told me he was at the hotel on Main Street, that he was not flying back until Saturday, and that I should eat something real for dinner.

"I will," I said.

"You won't. But say it anyway."

He left.

The house went quiet.

I sat at the kitchen table with the document in front of me and the ring on my left hand.

Three days.

Three days since the ring box hit the wall and Ryder walked out and I sat on the kitchen floor. Three days of waking up alone in a bed that was built for two. Three days of the bedroom door being open in the mornings because there was no one else to close it. Three days of making one cup of coffee instead of two and noticing it every single time.

I had not eaten properly. I had not slept well. I had spent two days furious and one day something quieter and harder to name. I had cried twice on Tuesday and once on Wednesday morning for no specific reason except that my body apparently had a backlog and was working through it on its own schedule.

I looked at the document.

His signature at the bottom. I knew his handwriting. The R and the K both slightly larger than the letters around them, the signature of someone who had learned early to sign their name like they meant it. Signatures told you something. The way a man signed a legal document told you something real.

He had signed his name to this child.

Before a test. Before certainty. Before I had done anything except tell him he had no right to doubt me, throw a ring box at a wall, and order him out of the house.

He had gone to Reeves and had this drafted and signed it.

Not to win me back. That was what Diego had said and I believed it because it was true to Ryder. Ryder did not perform. He did not work out what response would produce the result he wanted and then engineer it. He acted because the situation required action. He had gone to Manhattan without telling me because the situation required it. He had bought a pregnancy test and left it in the cabinet and waited because the situation required it.

He had signed this letter because that was the only real thing left to do. Not the words that could be walked back later. The signature on paper that could not.

It did not undo the question at the breakfast table.

Nothing would undo that. I had replayed it enough times in three days to know exactly how it had gone and what had been on his face when he asked it. That was the part that was hardest to sit with. Not just the words. His face. The doubt was on his face before the question was out of his mouth. I had seen it and I had known what it was and then he had confirmed it.

The damage was real. It was still there.

But.

The but was the document on the table. The but was Ryder choosing Diego as the witness because Diego was the name he had put in question and Diego was the one who deserved to hear it directly. The but was a man who had done something wrong and then gone to find the one action that actually addressed it, rather than an apology delivered into the air and waited on.

I pressed both hands flat on the table.

I was still angry.

I was also the woman who had pointed at a jeweler's window and said that was the ring she would want. Who had woken up one morning to find it on her finger. Who had gone to that same jeweler on a Tuesday afternoon and bought a ring of her own and carried it for six days in her coat pocket waiting for the right moment to give it to the man I always loved.

I was also the woman whose first prenatal appointment was in two days and who had not told the father.

I looked at the ring on my hand. Still there. The sapphire catching the kitchen light the same way it had the night he put it there.

I had not taken it off.

On the first day, when the anger was at its peak, I had looked at it and thought about putting it on the counter next to the ring box. I had not. Not because I was certain about anything. Because taking it off felt like a decision and I was not in a state to make one. You did not make permanent decisions in a moment that temporary.

The anger was not the same on day three. Still there. Still real. But less like a single sharp thing and more like something that had settled into the room and was sharing it with other things. The document. The ring. The appointment on Friday.

I reached for my phone.

I held it for a moment.

Ryder's name was in my contacts with no label. Just his name. That was how it had always been. You did not need a label for the person who was already everywhere in your life.

The baby's appointment was Friday. Eight-thirty in the morning. I had written it in my phone calendar and then immediately felt the absence of having not told him. He would have wanted to come. He would have asked the doctor three too many questions and driven me home and said very little on the way and been holding everything he was feeling on the inside the whole time.

He did not know.

He should know.

I unlocked my phone and opened the messages and typed his name and stopped.

I sat there for thirty seconds. Then I typed; 'Friday. 8:30am. Millbrook Women's Health. First appointment.'

I sent it before I could think more about it.

I put the phone face down on the table and did not look at it.

The baby's appointment was Friday.

He did not know.

He should know.

I looked at the phone.