In this paper, we investigate the Cauchy problem of the Sasa–Satsuma (SS) equation with initial data belonging to the Schwartz space. The SS equation is one of the integrable higher-order extensions of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation and admits a 3 × 3 Lax representation. With the aid of the ∂¯ -nonlinear steepest descent method of the mixed ∂¯ -Riemann–Hilbert problem, we give the soliton resolution and long-time asymptotics for the Cauchy problem of the SS equation with the existence of second-order discrete spectra in the space-time solitonic regions.