Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 102

Chapter 93; You Two Are Very Similar

Sedona’s POV

Clam

“You really are.” She brought the soup to the bedside table, pulled the chair close, and sat. The gesture of settling in for the evening, of being here until she was certain I’d eaten and rested and been sufficiently accompanied by someone who was here to make sure that I was recovering well.

“Now. Tell me what you and your brother were talking about when I came in, because I could hear the argument you guys had when you both had when you were teens when one of you was being obnoxious about something. You both had the look.” She said giving me that look that screamed, she can smell something juicy here and she was going to get it from me.

“What look?” I said acting very innocent because I did not want to think about what she was implying.

“The look you’ve had since you were children when one of you has gotten to something the other one doesn’t want to talk about yet.” She said hitting the nail right on the head even with no context but then again she was our mum, she started ladling soup into the bowl she’d brought from home, because hospital bowls weren’t the right shape, she’d explained on the second day, and had simply started bringing her own. “Was it Logan?”

I looked at her, surprised.

“Cameron told me he’d called,” she said, matter-of-factly like she had already judged something and come to her own conclusion about that particular thing and was waiting for the perfect moment to bring it up.

“He tells me things. Not everything, but things he thinks I should know.” She handed me the bowl. “I wasn’t going to bring it up unless you did.”

“How long have you known?”

“Two days.” She settled back. “I wanted to see how you were feeling about it before I said anything. Whether you needed to talk about it or whether you needed it to not be a topic.”

This was my mother as she’d been since I’d come home-not the mother I’d left, who’d loved me but had expressed it through expectation and direction, but this version, who’d apparently spent five years rearranging herself into someone who could wait, could read what was needed rather than providing what she thought should be needed. She had been aware of my feelings, well growing feelings about Dante and my lack of feelings towards Logan even before I could and she had decided to wait until I was waiting, which was different from Rachel who was going to make sure that I knew about it even if it was embarrassing.

“I’m not going back to him,” I said.

“I know,” she said simply.

“He called Cameron wanting to know if I’d see him. I said no.”

“Good.” She said it with the same simplicity, no further commentary, no analysis of whether it was the right decision or what it might mean or what Logan’s side of it might look like. Just: good.

You Two Avery Similar

Clam

“Nick,” I said. The name that always changed the texture of the conversation. “He sent a message through Cameron. That he didn’t mean the things he said. That he was just angry.”

My mother was quiet for a moment. I watched her absorb it, watched the complicated geography of her face as she felt things she was choosing how to express.

“He’s six,” she said finally.

“I know.”

“When you were six, you told Cameron that you hated him and wanted to exchange him for a dog.” She met my eyes. “I believe you then revised this position since then, you were furious and you lashed out at him, Cameron took it to heart and cried.”

Despite everything, something in my chest loosened slightly. “I did eventually stop wanting the dog.”

“Children say the worst things to the people they’re most certain of,” she said. “It’s backwards and it’s painful and it doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means.” She reached over and touched my hand, briefly. “He wants his mother. That’s what the message is, underneath the message.”

“I know.” I looked at the soup. “When I’m better-when I’m out of here-I want to figure out how to let him know I’m all right. Not a reunion, not a scene. Just-I want him to know I’m still here.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Together. When you’re ready.”

She refilled my bowl without being asked, with the instinct of someone who’d been feeding people for forty years and could see when a bowl needed refilling before the person holding it had noticed. Outside, Seattle was fully dark now, the rain finally arriving, the soft percussion of it against the window that I’d been listening to since childhood, the specific sound of being home.

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