Chapter 283 Diego's call

Chapter 283 Diego's call
Ryder's POV

Diego called at seven the next morning.

I was still at the clubhouse. I had slept in the room Jaxon had pointed at the night before, or tried to, and by six I had given up and was back at the bar with a coffee I did not particularly want. When my phone rang and I saw Diego's name I sat looking at it for two full rings before I answered.

"Kane," Diego said.

Not Ryder. Kane. That told me exactly what kind of call this was.

"Diego," I said.

"Sage told me what happened." His voice was controlled in the way voices went controlled when the person speaking had made a decision about how to handle something before they picked up the phone. "I am not calling to ask you how you are. I am calling because there are things I am going to say to you and I want you to listen to all of them before you speak."

"Okay," I said.

"Sage called me from the kitchen floor," Diego said. "Yesterday morning. She was crying. I want you to understand that before anything else. Sage Romano, who drove to Arizona alone and held herself together for three weeks and rebuilt herself from the ground up, was sitting on her kitchen floor crying because of a question you asked her at a breakfast table."

I said nothing.

"I am going to tell you about Arizona," Diego said. "Not because she asked me to. She did not ask me to do this. I am doing it because you need to hear it from me and because I am tired of being a question in your head that you have not been willing to ask out loud to the right person."

"Okay," I said.

"She was not okay when she arrived," Diego said. "She came off a bus in the middle of the night with one bag and she had been crying for hours. She slept for three days. She walked. She helped me cook. She did not talk about you directly for a long time but every day she would go quiet in the middle of something and I knew where she had gone. She had gone to you."

I pressed my palm flat on the bar.

"On day four she cried about you specifically," Diego said. "About whether what you had was real or whether she had made it bigger in her head than it actually was. I told her it was real. I told her I had seen the way you looked at her and it was real." His voice went flat on the next line. "That was not an easy thing for me to say."

I understood what he meant by that. Diego was a man who loved her and had stepped back because she had chosen me. Telling me that what she and I had was real was not something he had done for me. He had done it for her. And he was making sure I understood the difference.

"I sent her home because it was the right thing for her," Diego said. "Not because it was easy. She was not getting better in Arizona. She was surviving. And what she needed was to go back to Millbrook and go back to you and build whatever it was you were building." He paused. "Which she did. She came back and she rebuilt and she stood in a coffee shop and poured a drink over a man's head. She filed federal evidence packages. She got engaged on a piece of land by a river. She found out she was pregnant and she told you." A pause. "And the next morning you asked her if the baby was mine."

The word mine landed the way he intended it to.

"I warned you," Diego said, and his voice was no longer controlled. It was quiet in a different way. The way a man's voice went quiet when he was done managing what he felt and was letting it be in the room. "I told you not to hurt her. I said it to your face and I meant it. And you looked me in the eye and I believed you understood what I was saying." He stopped. "I was wrong about that."

"Diego—"

"I am not finished," he said. "We did not sleep together. Not in Arizona. Not before. Not ever. I want you to have heard that from me directly so that when you sit down with whatever is actually wrong with you, the thing underneath the six weeks, you cannot use me as a reason. I am not the reason. The reason is something you are going to have to find inside yourself."

The line was quiet for a moment.

"If she takes you back," Diego said, "and I am not saying she will, you are going to spend the rest of your life knowing that you asked that question. That is what you have earned. You are going to have to live with that and she is going to have to live with it and the only thing that makes it worth living with is if you actually deal with whatever put it there." His voice went colder. "Because if you do not, and if you hurt her again, I will not be calling. Are we clear?"

"We're clear," I said.

The line went dead.

I set the phone down.

Diego had called from Arizona, or wherever he was, at seven in the morning, to say things that cost him something to say. He had done that not for me. He had done it because Sage needed the truth to be on the table and because he had too much respect for her to let me stay confused about it.

I picked up my coffee and finished it.

I had a long road in front of me and Diego had just made it very clear that nobody was going to walk it for me. Whatever was underneath the six weeks, the real thing, the thing that had made my brain go where it went, I was going to have to find
it myself before I had any right to go back to that house.