Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 271

Chapter 259. What A Mother Does

SHERRY

I had not planned to go to Sedona. I had not planned, even to be on the flight, to actually go to the Lincoln Park house; I had told myself I was simply visiting an old friend, that the proximity to all of this was incidental, that I would decide what to do once arrived and not before.

This was not entirely honest. I understood that, sitting in the back of the car as it pulled up to a Georgian house on a tree-lined street I had no business knowing the address of, except that Logan had mentioned it once, distracted, and I had quietly remembered.

I told the driver to wait.

A woman answered the door. Jennifer, I assumed, though we’d never met. The mother who had apparently taken my former daughter-in-law back into a family I had no claim on whatsoever. She looked at me with that polite stillness. The kind of stillness people use when they’re deciding, in real time, how much reception a stranger on their doorstep actually deserves.

“I’m Sherry Hayes, Logan’s mother. I’m here to see Sedona, if she’s willing.”

Something moved across the woman’s face, recognition, then something more careful underneath it. “I’ll ask her,” she said, and left me on the doorstep in the cold, which I understood, even as it stung slightly, was exactly the correct amount of caution for her to extend a woman whose son had been the subject of a stalking complaint and was now, apparently, the subject of something far worse.

Sedona came to the door herself a few minutes later.

She looked different from how I remembered her. Not simply healthier, though she was that too, something in how she held herself, a kind of settled steadiness I had never once seen in three years of dinners and holidays and the careful performances of a daughter-in-law trying very hard to belong.

“Sherry,” she said. Even. Not unkind, but not warm either.

“Could we talk?” I said. “Just for a few minutes.”

She considered this, and she stepped onto the porch herself. The way she pulled the door sent a message clear enough to me that I was not going to be invited inside.

“A few minutes.”

“I know I have no right to be here.”

“You’re right about that,” Sedona said. Not cruel. Just factual, in a way that unsettled me more than anger would have.

“I’m frightened, Sedona.” I let that be the true thing it was, because I had decided, on the flight, that leading with the truth was my best chance. “I’m frightened for Logan. Something is happening to him, I see it, I’ve been watching it happen for weeks, the drinking, the way he’s stopped sounding like himself on the phone. And now this investigation…” I stopped myself. “I don’t fully understand what it is. I know it’s serious. I know it’s more serious than he’s told me.”

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The Account

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needed to remember that, needed to stand in a room with him and feel it directly instead of through court documents and supervised two-hour windows.

I did not examine, sitting there with the whiskey going warm in my hand, whether this was actually about Nick at all.

I did not examine whether it was instead about something simpler and uglier the specific need of a man watching every other piece of control sip out of his hands to reach for the one thing he still, a man who had lost the Cameron Preston pivot, was now watching his own financial architecture come apart in front of a grand jury he couldn’t manage with a phone call to his mother.

Nick was the last thing I hadn’t lost yet.

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What A Motherbleed

is serious, Sedona said. She didn’t elaborate.

Cla

“You were like a daughter to me,” I said. “For six years. I know that doesn’t mean what it should mean right now, given everything. But it was real, to me, even if I failed to show it the way I should have.” I felt my voice catch slightly, and I let it, because it was genuine even if everything around it was tangled with something less genuine underneath. “You of all people should understand what it means when someone isn’t well. You went through your own crisis. Nobody understood what was happening to you either, not fully, not until it was almost too late.”

Sedona was quiet for a moment, watching me.

“That’s true,” she said. “Nobody understood. Including you, who knew about the diagnosis and said nothing to anyone, because you didn’t want me to interfere with Logan and Catherine’s date

I felt that land exactly as hard as she intended it to.

“I’m not asking you to forgive any of that,” I said, recovering. “I’m asking you to consider that mental health doesn’t excuse everything, I know that. But it explains some of it. Logan didn’t grow up with much steadiness himself. His father wasn’t…” I stopped again, aware of how this sounded, aware that I was reaching for sympathy I hadn’t earned the right to ask for. “I’m asking if there’s any room left in you to consider that he’s unwell rather than simply cruel. If there’s any way to soften the custody position, just slightly, while everything with the investigation settles. He’s not going to survive losing everything at once, Sedona. The company, Nick, his freedom…”

“Sherry.”

Something in her voice stopped me.

“I need you to hear what you just did,” Sedona said calmly but steadily. “You came here to ask me to soften the custody case, the one built on a documented stalking complaint. A man who grabbed my arm in a garden. An attack that put Dante in the hospital with a knife wound. You’re asking me to make it easier for him, framed as concern for his mental health, while never once asking how I am. Or how Nick is. Or whether either of us has had a single moment of safety since this all began.”

“That’s not…”

“It’s exactly what you did,” Sedona said. Not raising her voice. Somehow, that made it worse, the flat, unbothered clarity of someone who had stopped needing to perform anger to be taken seriously. “You called it mental health. I call it a pattern. The investigation isn’t because Logan is unwell, Sherry. It’s because of what he actually did. Those are different things, and I think somewhere underneath everything you just said to me, you already know that.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

I stood on the porch in the cold, the driver still waiting at the curb, and felt the specific shame of having been seen clearly by someone I had hoped, foolishly, would still be soft enough to be moved by an old loyalty I had done very little to actually maintain.

“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” I said weakly.

“I know you believe that,” Sedona said. “I think you’ve believed a version of that your whole life. Every time you looked away from something that needed looking at.” Her voice softened, just slightly. The first crack of something gentler underneath the steadiness. “I’m not your enemy, Sherry. I don’t hate you. But I’m not

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