Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 181

Chapter 176: Back on Court

Sedona’s POV

The first time I picked up a racket again, cried.

Not immediately. Not when Dante handed it to me in the locker room in the facility he used when he was in seattle, I didn’t cry when I tested the grip with my fingers the way I’d done all my life growing up.

It was when I bounced the ball.

Just once, just the automatic motion of a player getting ready to serve, the ball going down, coming up, the sound of it on the court surface. That had brought a specific sound, one that I hadn’t heard since I left my family and the arranged marriage and ran away.

That was when I broke down and cried.

Dante didn’t say anything nor did he try to comfort me which was what I needed. Me processing this alone with out him making it into a big deal.

He stood at the net and waited, the way he waited for things, patiently giving me all the time I needed to get back in control.

I wiped my face with my wrist.

Bounced the ball again.

Served.

We’d been going three times a week for a month.

It had started small-Dante suggesting we use the facility, me saying I wasn’t ready to start swinging despite being cleared by the doctors but I had been too scared.

He countered saying we’d just hit a few balls, nothing serious. I had seen the hope in his eyes and I felt that I should give it a trial.

The first week I’d been terrible.

Not in the way of someone who’d been away from the game for a while and was rusty. Worse than that-I’d been terrible in the way of someone whose body had been through what mine had, bouts of chemotherapy which had worsened my body more than I had realized and made the most basic moves very difficult.

Dante had said nothing about how bad it was.

He’d just kept feeding me balls from the baseline and watching my footwork with the kind of focused attention he brought to things he was analyzing, and occasionally he’d say something specific and I’ll adjust based on his corrections.

By the second week it was slightly better more consistently.

By the third week I was remembering how it felt like. I could feel the shape of it returning, the patterns that Thad drilled into myself at sixteen, serving and running across to swing at the ball, keeping up with Dante.

“The inside-out forehand, Dante said one morning.

“What about it?”

“You’ve been avoiding it,” he said. “You’re going cross-court instead. Why?”

I hadn’t consciously noticed I was doing it. I thought about it for a moment. “The shoulder,” I said. “It pulls when I extend for the inside-out. The treatment-there’s still some-”

“Show me,” he said.

I showed him.

He watched with the assessing quality.

“Different swing path,” he said. “Not the classic one you do. Here-” He came to the baseline, stood beside me, showed me the adjustment without touching me, just the demonstration of it.

“You can get the same result with less shoulder engagement, It’ll feel wrong at first.”

“I’m ranked fourteen in the world,” he said, which wasn’t arrogance, just fact. “And I’m going back to the circuit in January.” He looked at me. “You don’t have to decide everything now. You just have to decide if you want to keep working.”

“I want to keep working,” I said.

“Then we keep working,” he said.

That had been three weeks ago.

Since then the sessions had become more serious. Dante had started playing against me rather just just feeding me balls. He kept me engaged, he fought against me like he would any player on the other end of the net.

He didn’t go easy on me.

This was the thing I’d expected him to do and he hadn’t done. I’d expected some version of accommodation, the adjusted intensity of someone playing.

It was the most respectful thing he could have done.

Drew came on the Saturday sessions.

He brought his bird book and sat in the observation area, watching the court quietly. When we finished he’d come down and give his report. *Your footwork is better on the right side than the left. Daddy doesn’t do that with his backhand, he holds his elbow differently.*

Dante looked at his four-year-old son one of those Saturdays with an expression that was somewhere between proud and disconcerted.

“He’s watching your technique,” Lucian had said, when I’d told him about it.

“He’s four,” I said.

“He’s Drew,” Lucian said, which was accurate and sufficient.