The man at the bar finally looked directly at them.
Sophia stopped breathing.
There was no uncertainty now.
The same dark hair.
The same narrow smile.
The same face she had studied in photographs for two weeks while wondering whether she was foolish for feeling excited about a stranger.
Ryan.
He had come.
That realization hurt more than the message.
Sophia had spent forty-five minutes telling herself that maybe something had happened to him.
Traffic.
An emergency.
Cold feet.
Anything that would explain why a man who had sounded so kind had left her waiting beneath a chandelier while strangers watched.
But Ryan had not left her waiting because he could not come.
He had been inside the restaurant.
Watching.
James looked from Ryan to Sophia.
‘Is that him?’
Sophia nodded once.
She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Ryan glanced toward the entrance as if considering whether he could simply walk out.
Then his eyes moved to James.
Something in his expression changed.
James Whitfield was the kind of man people in certain Los Angeles circles recognized even if they had never met him.
His face had appeared in business magazines often enough.
Ryan straightened his jacket.
Instead of leaving, he walked over.
That decision would be the second cruel thing he did that night.
The first had been hiding.
The second was believing he could explain it away.
‘Sophia,’ he said, stopping beside the table.
‘Look, this is awkward.’
Sophia stared at him.
‘You were here.’
Ryan exhaled as though she were making something simple unnecessarily difficult.
‘I came in a little early.’
‘How early?’
He hesitated.
James said nothing.
Sophia remembered the waiter approaching her at eight-ten.
She remembered looking toward the bar then, but she had been too nervous to study faces.
Ryan slipped his phone into his pocket.
‘Early enough.’
Sophia’s cheeks burned.
‘You saw me sitting here?’
Ryan lowered his voice.
‘I saw you come in.’
There it was.
No emergency.
No misunderstanding.
He had watched her enter the restaurant, watched her sit at the table he had chosen, and then decided she was not worth crossing the room for.
Sophia looked down at her emerald dress.
For one terrible second, she was back in front of the cracked mirror in her bedroom, smoothing the fabric while Carmen told her she looked beautiful.
Ryan followed her gaze and seemed to misunderstand the silence as permission.
‘I just realized we’re probably in different places in life,’ he said.
