Chapter 291 Waiting

Chapter 291 Waiting
Ryder's POV

My phone rang at seven forty-three in the evening.

I had been looking at it every fifteen minutes since Diego had texted to say he had given Sage the document and spoken to her and that she had read it. He had not told me what she said. He had not told me what she thought. He had sent one text and then gone quiet and I had been sitting in the room at the back of the clubhouse staring at the wall and at my phone in rotation ever since.

I picked up before it finished the first ring.

"Sage."

She said hi. I said hi back. We sat in the quiet of each other's presence on opposite ends of a phone line and I did not try to fill it with anything because the fact of the call was already more than I had been certain I was going to get and I was not going to spend it poorly.

She told me she had read the document.

She told me she had an appointment on Friday. Ten o'clock. Millbrook Family Practice. Dr. Osei.

I absorbed every word she said and I gave each one the space it needed and I did not reach for anything she was not offering. She was not calling to forgive me. She was not calling to talk about us. She was calling because there was an appointment and I was the father and she was not someone who would keep that from me regardless of what was happening between us. That was who she was. That was who she had always been.

She told me she was still angry.

"I know," I said.

She told me she had not decided anything about us.

"I know," I said.

She asked how I was and I told her honestly. The room, the not sleeping, the food Tommy kept bringing that I was not eating, Jaxon's ultimatum still sitting in my chest like something with sharp edges. I told her all of it without asking her to respond to it because she had not asked for my suffering as part of this call and I was not going to use it as leverage.

She said she cared about it and that it was irritating.

Something happened in my chest when she said that. Small. Contained. The first thing that was not pain in three days.

When the call ended I sat on the edge of the bed in the room at the back of the clubhouse and held my phone and did not move for a while.

She had called.

She had read the document and she had let Diego tell her about the statement and she had called. Not to say anything definitive. Not to open a door wide. But to tell me there was an appointment on Friday. To give me the information. To treat me like the father of this child even when she was furious at the man.

Tommy appeared in the doorway ten minutes later. He did not knock because Tommy did not knock on things. He leaned in the frame and looked at me.

"She called," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"What did she say?" Tommy asked.

I told him. The appointment. The acknowledgment of the document. I am still angry. I have not decided anything.

Tommy listened with the expression he had when he was processing something carefully before he responded.

"She kept the ring on," he said.

"Diego said she had not taken it off," I said.

"She kept the ring on for three days," Tommy said. "She called you about the appointment. She told you she understood what the letter was." He looked at me steadily. "That is not nothing."

"I know it's not nothing," I said. "I also know it is not fixed. I know we are nowhere near fixed."

"No," Tommy said. "But you're not over either. And three days ago I was not certain you weren't over."

I looked at my hands on my knees.

"She said she would let me know before Friday whether she wants me at the appointment," I said.

"She left it open," Tommy said.

"She left it open," I said.

"Which means she is considering yes," Tommy said.

"Which means she has not decided no," I said. "Those are not the same thing."

"Fair," Tommy said. He pushed off the doorframe. "Eat something. I am going to bring you something from the kitchen and you are actually going to eat it this time."

"Tommy—"

"You are going to be a father," Tommy said, from the hallway. "You cannot be a father on no sleep and no food. Eat the thing."

He disappeared.

I sat in the room that smelled like industrial cleaner and old wood and the absence of anyone who actually lived there and thought about ten o'clock on Friday and what it would mean to be in a room where they showed you the first evidence that a person was beginning. The first image of something that was becoming someone.

I wanted to be there.

I wanted it more than I had wanted anything in three days, which was saying something given what the three days had contained.

But wanting it did not give me the right to it. Sage had said she would let me know. That meant the answer was hers to give and mine to wait for and the waiting was the correct thing to do regardless of how difficult it was.

I was good at waiting. I had always been good at waiting.

I was going to wait for this.

Tommy came back with a plate and set it on the dresser without ceremony.

"Eat," he said.

I ate.