Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 169

Dante’s Confession

Sedona’s POV

Dante had suggested the restaurant.

Not asked-suggested, which was how he did most things. He’d said there’s a place on the water I’ve been to before, Thursday if you’re free, and I’d said yes without overthinking it, which I’d been trying to do more of recently. Not overthinking things. Saying yes when yes was available.

The restaurant was small, the kind that didn’t try too hard-wood tables, the water visible through large windows, a menu that was short enough to suggest they did the things on it well rather than many things adequately. It was the middle of a Thursday afternoon, past the lunch rush, and we had a corner table with the view and a reasonable amount of quiet around us.

I’d ordered the salmon, which my mother would have approved of.

Dante had ordered something with fish too

We’d been talking for forty minutes about ordinary things.

The boys-Drew’s bird catalogue had expanded, Lake had apparently provided a field identification that Drew had disputed, and the dispute had been resolved through the consultation of two separate books and the conclusion that Lake had been correct, which Lake had received with great satisfaction and Drew had received with the acknowledgment of someone accepting a result that didn’t entirely please him.

My walks-the route was getting longer, I’d made it past the maple and around the full block now, which Frank had said was good and which felt, on the days, when I did it without thinking about the distance, like something approaching normal,

Nick-I’d told him a little about the calls, the three of them now, each one more settled than the last.

The food came and we ate and the conversation continued and at some point the plates were cleared and the tea arrived and Dante looked at me across the table with the expression that was different and more serious now.

I knew the difference now. I’d been learning the differences for weeks.

“I want to tell you something,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

He looked at his tea for a moment.

“When I came to the hospital,” he said. “The first time. I want to be honest about why.”

“You said you heard I was there,” I said. “Through the circuit.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But it’s not complete.” He looked up. “I came because I’d been wondering about you for years: Since you left the circuit. I asked around for a long time, a couple of years, trying to find out what had happened to you. Nothing turned up. And then I heard through Enzo, after he and Rachel got together, that you’d been found.” He paused. “Not found. That you’d cortie home.”

“I didn’t want it to just be Rachel’s information,” he said. “I wanted you to have it from me directly. So you could ask questions if you had them, or tell me something I needed to hear, or-” He paused. “Or just have it, and do with it whatever you need to do.”

I looked at him.

Dante Wells, who had known me when I was sixteen and at the junior nationals with everything still ahead of me, who had won the match and said I was going to be a problem for everyone and meant it as the compliment it was. Who had come to a hospital when he heard I was sick, not knowing if I’d see him. Who had come back the next day with soup he’d made himself, and the day after that, and the day after that, until showing up had become simply what he did.

Who had a four-year-old son who collected leaves as evidence and had taken my hand on a walk without announcement because he’d decided I was safe.

Who had sat beside my hospital bed and asked how I felt about things rather than how I was supposed to feel about them.

“Why now?” I asked. “You’ve been here for weeks. Why are you telling me now?”

“Because you’re better,” he said simply “When I came to the hospital, you were fighting for your life. The weeks after that, you were recovering. I wasn’t going to-” He stopped, found the right words. “I didn’t want to add to what you were carrying. I didn’t want to be a thing you had to manage on top of everything else.” He looked at me steadily

“But you’re walking to the maple and back every day and your markers are holding and you’re making plans. You’re not in survival mode anymore. You’re in your life.” A pause. “I thought you deserved to know now. When you have the capacity to actually think about it rather than just file it somewhere.”

“File it somewhere,” I said.