Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 155

Chapter 149: Hospital Checkup

Sedona’s POV

Frank’s interim check was on a Tuesday

Claim

It was not a full appointment-he’d been clear about that when he’d scheduled it, had said interim check with the specific emphasis of someone who wanted to manage expectations but not alarm me..it was not a full assessment, not a milestone, just a look at where the markers were sitting three weeks after discharge.

I went alone.

That was the first thing I’d done alone since coming home-not because my family hadn’t offered, because they had, my mother in particular had offered to go and I could see how anxious she was about it, even more anxious than me and it was rubbing off on my dad and brothers who were cancelling things just to tag along because they were worried about what it would say.

But I’d wanted to go alone. I’d wanted to sit in Frank’s waiting room and be a person going to a medical appointment rather than a person being accompanied to a medical appointment, which was a distinction that mattered to me in ways I was still figuring out how to say, Cameron had understood it saying that he knows that I wanted to feel like I had the situation under control and had reluctantly agreed to it but under the promise that if I hear anything bad, I would call him and not drive.

I had promised. I told my dad and mum who agreed as well deciding to let me do this for myself.

The waiting room was familiar. I’d spent a significant amount of time in it across two months, and seeing the familiar place, with the same familiar antiseptic smell and the familiar nurses stirred something in my heart that I didn’t want to think too closely about.

Frank came out at ten past ten, which was eight minutes earlier than his scheduled time. He looked at me the way he’d been looking at me for two months, the way that had shifted as the weeks progressed, it had started off as the neutral expression of a doctor who was doing his job and as time went on, it turned out to be him invested in an outcome and was watching it continue to arrive.

“You look better,” he said.

“I feel better,” I said.

“That tracks,” he said, and smiled, which was something he did a lot more now with me.

The markers were holding.

He showed me the numbers on the chart. The downward trend had continued. The rate of improvement was moving at a steady pace, not too slow and not too fast and Frank had assured me that this was the best because it showed my body was taking its time to heal and not frantically jumping up and down which might leave some residues in places where we assumed I was better and it would show up unexpectedly. That I should think of it this way that my body was consolidating.

Hospital Checkup-1

Clam

Consolidating. I’d liked that word when he’d used it. It had the quality of something deliberate, something chosen, the word for what happened after a battle when you held the territory you’d taken.

“Light physical activity,” he said, when he’d finished with the numbers. “Walking, primarily. Not strenuous. Not anything that spikes your heart rate significantly or requires extended recovery.” He looked at me with the direct quality. “And not tennis.”

“I know,” I said.

“I know you know,” he said. “I’m saying it anyway because in my experience patients with athletic backgrounds tend to give them selves their own definition of what they think is light the slightest they feel a bit better. Something your friend Dante seems capable of doing.

“I have been playing tennis in my head,” I said. “Does that count?”

“It does not count,” he said. “But it’s encouraging that you’re playing tennis in your head. Three months ago you weren’t.”

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