Ronin's head came up slowly, as his brain was still engaged with the woman beside him. She watched, almost absently, as irritation gave way to shock. His pupils widened, eating up the green until only a thin rim of colour remained. His lips parted.
Fight or flight, thought Sage absently.
"Sage...what are you doing here?" His voice was low and rough, like he'd been caught by a firing squad and didn't know which part to protect first.
Delaying tactics, mused Sage. It was amazing how she could precisely pinpoint what was going through his head while her heart was bleeding.
The woman's smile faltered, her sloe eyes widening in surprise, but it wasn't the startled guilt she expected. There was guilt, yes, but it quickly morphed into something else. Relief. Relief that the secret was out, that she no longer had to hide.
So much for sisterhood.
Ronin's face drained of colour.Pasty was not a good look on him, Sage thought. His lips parted. "I..." His voice stumbled before he swallowed and tried again in a hushed coward’s voice. "I was going to tell you." He glanced at the woman beside him. "This is Amanda... She's...a friend."
Amanda turned to Sage then, offering the faintest of polite smiles, though it didn't quite reach her beautiful eyes.
Ronin's gaze shifted back to Sage, the muscles of his jaw locking for a second. "No...no , actually we've been seeing each other. I'm sorry, Sage.”
He stretched his hand out to her in a gesture of supplication as she involuntarily took a step back. “Wait...wait, let me explain."
Her eyes dropped, not to avoid him, but because something at the edge of her vision caught her eye. Her own hand, resting on the table. She hadn’t realized that she had sat down in the chair the maître d' had pulled for her. The large solitaire gleaming under the warm light seemed almost absurd now. She had been so grateful when he had slipped it on her finger.
When she looked up again, Amanda's hand was moving, slow and deliberate, until her pale fingers covered Ronin's darker ones in a soft, claiming press. A ruby surrounded by tiny diamonds and a simple gold wedding band caught the light on Amanda's ring finger, a jarring, silent statement that landed heavier than any word Ronin might have chosen.
Sage felt her stomach drop. It was the same sensation when you drop from the the highest point of a rollercoaster.
It wasn't the contact itself that cut the deepest; it was the ease of it, the way Amanda's gesture said without words:He's mine now.
Sage's gaze lingered on the ring for a beat too long before drifting upwards. She was only half aware of Ronin speaking. His voice rose and fell in waves, carrying a long, convoluted explanation she couldn't seem to hold on to. Words reached her in pieces—...work together ...didn't mean to ...you weren't... I thought you...—fragments she couldn't, wouldn't, assemble into sense.
She was vaguely aware of the woman at the next table looking their way. The elderly gentleman on the other side turned away as soon as their eyes met over Amanda’s head. They were making a scene. The very thing Ronin hated.
There was no pain, not yet. Just a thick, airy wall, like spun sugar, between her and what she knew was waiting on the other side. The sweetness of it was false; she knew it would dissolve too quickly, and when it did, the truth beneath would be bitter and jagged.
But not now.
Not yet.
She nodded once as if waking from a nightmare. There were no accusations, no scene from her. There was just the acknowledgment that now they all knew. The air felt heavy between the three of them, as if the weight of the truth was pressing down onto the crowded room, making it hard to breathe.
She pushed her chair back, the scrape of wood on the tile louder than it should have been. Without a word, without another look at either of them, she turned and walked out into the cold.
The taxi smelled faintly of stale coffee, sweat and cigarettes. She almost never took them because they were too expensive. Since she'd stopped working in his company, Ronin had been the one to put money into their joint account. She'd always been careful, using only what was necessary. She didn't buy the black dress with the red flowers that she had loved. She didn't buy the hairpin shaped like a sparrow that she had admired through the shop window last spring. She tended to forget that though Ronin financed the company, she had worked as hard to get it off the ground. But she had been unemployed for almost fifteen years and in her mind, she couldn't spend what she hadn't earned.
Today, she didn't care.
David was in the kitchen when she got home, the fridge door open, his arm deep inside. "Hey," she said, trying to sound normal. "How was school? Maths challenge's next week, isn't it?"
He mumbled something, then slipped past her out of the room.
The silence pressed in again. She sat at the kitchen island instead of prepping for tea, staring at the place mats she'd chosen years ago, wondering how they could look the same when her whole world had gone topsy-turvy.
Half an hour must have passed before she heard the car pull up. The front door opened and after a pause, Ronin's footsteps sounded in the hall. Then, there was the squelch of the seat as he sat at the kitchen island.
He started talking almost immediately. "We work together. It...it just happened."
She didn't move or look at him as she carefully examined a hangnail on her right thumb.
"I was going to tell you."
