Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 129

Chapter 118: Protecting Her From The Truth

JENNIFER POV

Logan nodded. Once, quickly. “Yes.. I’m sorry. For all of it. Please-if you could just-“He stopped. Understood that he wasn’t going to get the sentence finished in a way that helped. “I’m sorry.”

He left.

He walked away down the produce aisle with the gait of a man who was holding himself together through will, turned at the end, and was gone.

Parker and I stood in the produce section with the pears, watching him leave.

“Are you all right?” Parker asked.

“Yes.” I looked at my hand, which felt normal. “He didn’t-it wasn’t aggressive. He was-” I paused. “He’s a man who’s arrived somewhere true about himself and doesn’t know what to do with it.”

“That doesn’t entitle him to access.”

“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t.”

Parker picked up a Honeycrisp, looked at it, put it back. His hands were steady, which they always were.

“He’s been in Seattle for days,” I said. “He’s been here for days trying to get to her.”

“Cameron knows?”

“Cameron spoke to him by phone. Gave him her answer. He’s-” I paused. “He didn’t accept it.”

Parker was quiet for a moment. I could see him thinking, about what this meant.

“We need to tell Cameron,” he said finally.

“Yes.”

“Today.”

“Yes.” I picked up two more pears, checked them, put one back. “Not Sedona.”

Parker looked at me.

“Not yet,” I said. “She’s having a good week. The markers are down. Frank is cautiously optimistic and she’s been-she’s been herself again, Parker. She’s been eating and she’s been laughing and she’s been-” stopped. “I don’t want to put this in that room. Not this week. Not when she’s fighting so hard.”

He was quiet for a moment, considering, which was what Parker did-he didn’t agree quickly or disagree quickly, he considered and then he decided and when he decided it was with the fullness of someone who’d looked at it properly.

“That’s your call,” he said. “You know her better than I—”

“I don’t know her better than you do. We both lost the same years.” I looked at the apples. “But I’ve been with her every day since she came home, and I know this week. And this week is not the week.”

“All right,” he said. “Not this week.”

“But Cameron needs to know today. In case he-in case Logan approaches again. In case he goes to the hospital and tries-” I stopped, because the thought of Logan Hayes getting past the private ward protocols was something needed to address practically rather than emotionally.

“Cameron can handle the practical side. He can make sure the hospital is aware.”

“I’ll call him,” Parker said.

“He’ll be upset.”

“He’ll handle it.”

When he got in the car, he said: “Cameron’s going to contact the hospital. Make sure the ward protocols are reinforced.”

“Good.”

“He said-” Parker paused. “He said Logan has been at the hospital already. Tried to get past the front desk. The private ward refused to give him the information he needed.”

“Good,” I said again.

Parker started the car. “He also said-and this is Cameron, who understands his sister better than he always lets on-that when the time is right, Sedona is going to need to decide about Nick. Not Logan. But Nick.”

“I know.”

“And that the deciding will be easier if she’s stronger. Which she’s getting.”

“She is.” I looked out the window at Seattle, at the city my daughter had come home to, at the streets she’d grown up on, at the place that had held the shape of her while she was gone. “She really is, Parker.”

He drove, and I held the grocery bags in my lap, and we went back to the hospital where our daughter was getting stronger by degrees, by markers, by the specific incremental math of a body fighting its way back.

I didn’t tell her.

When I arrived and she looked up at me with the face she’d had lately, I smiled and put the food on the counter and started unpacking, and I talked about the grocery store in the way I’d learned to talk about ordinary things.

The apples. The pears. The ginger. The produce section.

Not the man I’d met there.

Not yet.