Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 130

Chapter 119: Missing Nick

Sedona’s POV

I’d been thinking about Nick for eleven days, since Cameron dropped the bomb that Logan had been calling him for information about me.

Claim

This was nothing like the thinking that I had done in the early weeks, the kind that arrived with a kind of pain and physical force that needed to be managed before it became something that interfered with the treatment, that I had just started and was uncertain of the results.. That version had been part of the fever, part of the worst nights, the delirious reaching for him that Cameron had sat with me through, his hand against the glass of the observation window, steady while I wasn’t.

This was different. This was the thinking that came with being better, this was the kind of thinking that I was doing in the background irrespective of what I was thinking about.

When Dante brought food in the morning and I watched him arrange it on the table with that particular methodical attention, I thought about Nick’s face when I’d made astronaut soup for him because he had been ill and it was something I did to make him feel better, I remembered the way he’d identified the star-shaped pasta with the delight of a child who’d been looking for patterns and found one.

When my mother sat beside my bed and talked about ordinary things that had been going on outside my ward room, the busy lives of her friends and situationships that was right down messy, filling the room with the warmth of someone who had decided that her job was to make the room feel like a room where living happened rather than letting it be a room where something was being endured, I thought about Nick asking Mrs. Peterson about me, the daily question Logan had mentioned, the hope getting progressively smaller each time the answer was the same.

When I was too exhausted to think, Nick was still there, in the spaces between thoughts.

He was six. He’d told Logan he hadn’t meant the things he’d said at the hospital. He’d made a card with colored paper and markers that he wanted to send to me.

I knew these things because Cameron had told me what Logan had said on the phone.

I knew them secondhand not from Logan himself, but the version that had been filtered through my brother who had filtered them through his own protective instincts, which meant I’d received the version that Cameron had decided I was ready for.

What I didn’t know was whether Nick was all right. Really all right, in the specific way that only came from hearing his voice or seeing his face, the way that secondhand reports couldn’t cover no matter how hard they tried.

On the eleventh day, I asked the nurse for an outside phone.

“Just a landline call,” I said, in the tone I’d developed for making requests that I didn’t want to become discussions. “I need to make a personal call.”

She brought it without commentary, which was one of the things I’d come to appreciate about the nursing staff at St. Anthony’s-they’d seen enough of what people needed in hospital rooms to have developed a

13

Missing Nuch-

Claims

good instinct for when they needed to probe and when they needed to just leave it at the surface level.

theld the phone for a moment before I dialed.

The landline number for Logan’s house was one of those things I’d retained without deciding to retain it, the way you retained certain numbers because they’d been dialed often enough that the pattern of them lived in your fingers rather than your memory. I’d called it thousands of times across three years. I’d called it to say I was running late, to ask whether Nick needed anything from the store, to check whether the spare inhaler had been restocked after the last time. The number had been so ordinary that I’d stopped thinking about it as information and had started thinking about it as just the sound of dialing home.

I dialed.

It rang twice.

“Hello?”

The voice was not Logan’s, and it was not Mrs. Peterson’s, and it was not a voice I’d expected to hear, which meant my body registered who it was before my brain had registered it completely because my hand had gripped the phone tightly, which was still pressed to my ear.

Catherine.

The silence that followed was four seconds long. I know because I counted them, the same way I had learned to count when the treatment was worse and I needed to breathe through it.

Four seconds in which Catherine was waiting and I was recalibrating and we were both doing it in real time with no preparation, because neither of us had planned for this particular Tuesday morning

conversation.

“Sedona,” she said. Her voice had the quality of someone who’d thought about this possibility before and had prepared something for it. The warmth was immediate, which was itself information-the warmth of someone who’d rehearsed being warm rather than the warmth that arrived without preparation. “I’m so glad you called.”

I did not say I’m glad too, because I wasn’t, and because the thing that was sitting in my chest at the sound of her voice was not glad but was something more complicated that I needed to manage carefully.

“Is Nick there?” I asked.

“He’s at school, sweetheart.” Sweetheart. The word landed with the specific texture of something that didn’t fit, the endearment of someone claiming a familiarity that hadn’t been established between us, we were not close for her to start calling me pet names, but this time was more of an insult or mockery rather than fondness. “He won’t be back until three.”

“Is he well?” I asked. “Has he been-the hives-”

“He’s doing beautifully,” she said. “Honestly, Sedona, he’s in such a good place right now. The structure has been really wonderful for him. He responded so well to having-” A pause as she was choosing what to say. “To having consistency.”

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