Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 131

Chapter 120: The Phone Call

Sedona’s POV

He’s adjusting. He’s thriving without me there. He’s so much happier without me being there to make his life miserable.

I pressed my hand flat against the hospital blanket and felt the texture of it, gripping onto it, because it was the only thing that felt real underneath my hands. I forced myself to put on a fake cheery tone as I continued.

“I’m glad he’s eating properly,” I said carefully. “He has a very specific dietary-”

“I know,” Catherine said, casually with the warmth of someone sharing something with me.

“He told me all about it, actually. He explained the whole thing-the fragrance-free requirement that he needed because his skin was too sensitive, the nut situation, the inhaler protocol, both the main and emergency ones were. He’s been quite the little educator. I think-” I could hear the smile in her voice, which was a specific kind of difficulty to receive.

“I think he was trained very thoroughly. He takes it very seriously. He doesn’t joke about his life, not after the first scare and I had to stay up all night looking after him because his mum abandoned him to prove a point.”

I trained him on that. I spent three years since he was old enough to remember basic things about his health and I was.making sure he knew his own body’s rules well enough to say them, because the day would come when I wasn’t in the room and he’d need to be able to tell someone what he needed. I’d made it into a game at first, when he was three-the rules of Nick’s body, like a superhero’s specific powers and vulnerabilities-and we’d rehearsed it until he had it, until it was his rather than just mine.

“I’m glad he remembers all those things,” I said.

“He remembers everything,” Catherine said. There was something fond in it, and something else underneath the fondness that I was not letting myself think about yet.

“He’s a remarkable child, Sedona. Truly. You did-” Another pause, this one slightly different. “The foundation is very solid and can stand without you as the support beams. He’s a really wonderful boy.”

The past tense of it. The way she’d constructed the sentence-*you did*-as if the doing was complete, finished, a phase that had concluded.

“I’d like to speak to him,” I said. “When he’s home from school. What time does-”

“Of course,” she said. “Of course, I’ll make sure he calls. I’ll have Nick-” She stopped, calculating as she continued on smoothly.

“I’ll make sure he knows you called.”

“What time does he get home?” I asked again, because she hadn’t answered the question, he had advanced to a new class with a new closing time and I had not yet known the new schedule.

I said nothing.

“What I’m trying to say,” Catherine continued, with the specific tone of someone who had deluded herself that what she was doing was kindness, “is that I know him. I know what drives him. And I would hate for you to-in whatever state you’re in, wherever you are, I would hate for you to interpret his looking as something it might not be, him looking doesn’t mean he has fallen for you, he is looking because you are someone in his life who was gone and he needs to be able to account for your disapperance if case anyone asks him, and he doesn’t want to get sued for his wife disapperance.. He would have looked eventually, I think, regardless. Because not knowing is something he can’t maintain when people are asking questions. And for Nick as well, because he needs his mum even though he barely mentions-”

She was implying that Logan was still with her, and they were building something together with Nick and he was only looking for me to not let it become something that shows them, or put Catherine in the light as a mistress, BYU wanting us to meet and clear the air.

He barely mentions-

Mentions me. He barely mentions me. That was the end of the sentence she hadn’t finished.

I thought about the card with the colored paper and the markers. I thought about Nick asking Mrs.

Peterson every day, the hope getting progressively smaller. I thought about a six-year-old who had sent a message to his mother through his father because he couldn’t send it directly, because he didn’t have the number, to reach me himself because I had disconnected it.