Instead, he said, “You should not have learned what he was in that room.”
That nearly broke me.
Pity would have made me defensive.
Anger would have kept me upright.
His simple acknowledgment reached the place I had been protecting all night.
I looked down at the sauce dried on my cardigan.
“I made fresh pasta.”
“I know.”
The answer startled me.
Ronan nodded toward the copied key in my hand.
“You don’t carry a key, homemade sauce, and that expression unless you arrived expecting to give someone something good.”
I swallowed hard.
For the first time since the bedroom door opened, I cried.
Not dramatically.
No collapsing against his chest.
Tears simply slipped down my face while Jade moved closer and Ronan looked away long enough to give me privacy.
When I could breathe again, he offered me a car home.
“I can take her,” Jade said.
Ronan inclined his head.
“Then both of you should use mine.
Finn is angry, and anger makes him careless.”
Jade studied him before accepting.
Ronan did not ride with us.
He remained at the bar with the folder and the tall man, already speaking to someone from legal.
That restraint mattered more than I understood at the time.
Finn called seventeen times before dawn.
His messages changed with every hour.
First came explanations.
Meredith had been upset.
They had been drinking.
It had happened only once.
Then apologies.
He loved me.
He had made a mistake.
He could fix this.
Then blame.
I had invaded his privacy.
I had humiliated him in front of his father.
I had damaged his career by repeating something I did not understand.
The final message said, You always wanted to be part of this family.
Congratulations.
I blocked him.
The next afternoon, Jade helped me pack everything Finn had left at my apartment.
Two shirts, running shoes, a razor, and a framed photograph of us taken beside the lake.
I removed the photograph from the frame and tore it once through the middle.
The rest went into a box delivered to his building’s concierge.
I kept the copied key only long enough to hand it to the investigator who contacted me three days later.
The investigator was not Ronan’s employee.
He worked for an outside law firm hired by the company’s board.
Ronan had removed himself from the committee reviewing Finn because of their relationship.
That surprised me.
It would have been easy for him to control the investigation.
Instead, he created distance from it.
I gave a statement in a conference room with glass walls.
I described the time I entered the apartment, Meredith’s bracelet, the clothes on the floor, and the exact words Finn used at Clover & Ash.
No one asked about my feelings.
