Chapter 179: Doesn't Matter. Not Anymore.

Chapter 179: Doesn't Matter. Not Anymore.
Chapter 179: Doesn't matter. Not anymore.

ANNA SERRANO

I sat in my car with both hands resting on the steering wheel and felt the old hurt move through me, not sharp like it once was, but present. A dull ache in a place that had mostly healed. I thought about the GPS and the way I'd pasted the address without looking, and I wondered if that was deliberate. If he had counted on me doing exactly that.

My hand found the ignition.

Turn around, said the part of me with the most self-preservation. He doesn't get to bring you back here. Not to this place. Not like this.

And I nearly did.

I had the intention fully formed. The decision made. I was already constructing the message I would send him — brief, cool, no explanation required —

And then the restaurant door opened.

He stepped out onto the pavement. Abel. His eyes swept the street with an immediacy that told me he'd been watching for a while, checking, hoping. He stood there for a moment in the evening air — and even from inside the car, even at this distance, I could see something in his posture that I hadn't expected.

Not arrogance. Not the careful composure he used to wear like armour in public.

Something quieter. Something smaller.

He turned and walked back inside when he didn't see what he was looking for.

I sat with the ache in my chest and the engine off and the evening pressing in around the car.

Let's get this over with, I told myself. That was all. Not forgiveness, not reconciliation, not anything that resembled opening a door I had spent a long time closing. Just closure, if it even came to that. Just the end of the back-and-forth. Just a conversation with a full stop at the end of it.

I picked up my clutch, pushed the car door open, and stepped into the evening.

My heels were steady on the pavement as I walked toward the entrance.

Whatever was waiting inside, I would handle it.

I always did.

The restaurant was exactly as I remembered it.

That was the first thing I noticed as I pushed through the door — not Abel, not the handful of other diners scattered across the room, not the soft ambient lighting or the familiar scent of the place. Just the unchanged quality of it. Like time had made a deliberate exception here, had looked at these walls and this furniture and this particular arrangement of tables and decided, not this one. Everything outside had shifted and moved and grown in five years. In here, nothing had.

I wasn't sure if that was comforting or cruel.

I spotted Abel before my eyes had fully adjusted. He was already standing — had probably been watching the door for longer than he'd want me to know. He rose the moment he saw me, the way you rise for something you weren't certain was actually coming, and something about that involuntary motion, that barely-contained relief, told me more about the last few weeks of his life than any phone call could have.

I walked toward him slowly, taking him in as I crossed the room.

He had dressed with intention — I could see that. The clothes were deliberate, carefully chosen, an effort made. But the clothes could only do so much when the face above them looked like that. Drawn. Hollowed in places. The particular look of a man who had stopped sleeping properly and started thinking too much, in that order. Whatever he had uncovered in his investigation had cost him something. It showed.

Good, said a small, uncharitable part of me.

Now you know what it costs.

"You're here," he said when I reached the table. Like he needed to say it out loud to confirm it. Like he'd spent the last hour quietly convincing himself I wouldn't show.

I pulled out the chair across from him and sat, setting my clutch on the table with a composure I had assembled carefully on the walk from the car and intended to maintain. "I told you I would come." I met his eyes. "I don't break my word, Mr. Donovan." A beat. "Unlike some people."

His jaw tightened slightly. He absorbed the blow without defending himself — just sat back down across from me and exhaled, slow and measured, like a man who had decided in advance to accept whatever came.

That, too, told me something.

The silence that followed wasn't comfortable but it wasn't hostile either. It was the silence of two people who had said enormous things to each other over the years — shouted things, whispered things, left things unsaid until unsaid became its own language — sitting in the aftermath of all of it.

Abel broke it first. "Thank you for coming. For picking up. For—" He stopped. Started again. "Just. Thank you."

I nodded once. "Let's not waste time with preamble." I folded my hands on the table. "How did you know my favourite flowers? My snacks. The jewelry." I watched his face. "You didn't know any of that when we were married."

"I—" He paused. "Can we order something first? Please."

"I'm not hungry."

"Anna." He said my name quietly, and there was something in the way he did it — not manipulative, not strategic, just tired and earnest and worn — that made me press my lips together and look away briefly.

"Fine."

He signaled the waiter without making a production of it. When the young man came, I ordered something light, something I could ignore if the conversation went somewhere that killed my appetite — which I fully expected it would. When the waiter turned to Abel, he simply said, "Whatever she ordered."

I looked at him.

He looked back at me, and there was something in his expression that I didn't have a category for, so I filed it under irrelevant and moved on.

"Why here?" I asked. My voice was quieter now. Deliberate. "Of all the restaurants in this city, Abel. Why this one?"

Something shifted in his face — lit up, almost, like the question itself was a small gift. "You remember it."

"That's not an answer. And it doesn't matter. Not anymore."

"It's quiet. Private. The kind of place where a real conversation can happen without an audience." He glanced around the room, and then something softer moved across his expression. "And it hasn't changed much. Has it." Not quite a question.

"No," I said. "It hasn't."

Private. He had loved that about this place once. Privacy had been his great preoccupation during our marriage — not the intimacy of it, not the sanctuary, but the concealment. The careful management of who saw us and when and in what context. I had been his wife and I had lived in the margins of his public life like a footnote he hadn't decided whether to include.

"Private," I repeated slowly. "Yes. You always did love that about it."

He heard it. The edge beneath the word, the history it carried. His mouth pressed into a line and he didn't argue, because there was nothing to argue. It was simply true.

"Anna. I'm sorry." The words came out low and without decoration. "For all of it. For so much of it."