Chapter Nineteen — Ty, In Person
She agreed to see Ty six months after she'd thrown him out of Copper & Rye, and only because Zaire asked, carefully, without pushing, whether she'd be willing — not for his sake, he was clear, but because Ty had asked to apologize properly and Zaire thought she deserved the choice of whether to grant that, even if the answer was no.
The answer, eventually, was yes.
Ty came to the lounge on a slow Monday, no glitter sash, no bachelor-party bravado, sat across from her at the bar looking like a man who had spent six months getting smaller in the specific, useful way that guilt sometimes shrinks a person down to something more honest.
"I've thought about what to say for months," he admitted. "Every version sounded like an excuse. So I'm just going to say the true thing and let it sound as bad as it sounds."
"Go ahead."
"I loved my boy more than I respected you," Ty said.
"That's it. That's the whole thing. I told myself I was protecting him, helping him, being a good friend.
But a good friend would've told him to come clean the first week, not the fourth month.
I let it ride because it was easier than the hard conversation, and I told myself your feelings were collateral damage in a story that wasn't really about you.
That was wrong. You weren't collateral. You were a whole person I helped hurt, and I'm sorry, and I'm not going to ask you to say it's okay, because it's not, and it shouldn't have to be for you to have a right to move on from it. "
Kamiko studied him for a long moment — the loud, easy man from that first night, stripped down to something quieter, more careful, genuinely remorseful in a way she hadn't expected and found, despite herself, she believed.
"I'm not going to pretend we're friends," she said.
"Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. But I hear you.
And for what it's worth — you did one thing right, that whole mess.
You told me the truth about the tracking, even though it made you look terrible, even though you could've kept it buried.
That counted for something, even when I was too angry to say so. "
"I needed you to have the whole picture," Ty said. "Even the parts that made me the villain of it."
"That's more than a lot of people manage," Kamiko said, and something between them loosened, not into friendship yet, but into the possibility of it, which was more than she'd expected to feel walking into that conversation.