Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 283

Chapter 271: What She Knew

SHERRY

The detective had a kind face, which somehow made it harder than if he’d been the cold, accusatory type I’d braced myself for all the whole time.

I’d expected hostility. I think I’d almost wanted something I could push back against. Something that would let me feel like the victim of an interrogation, and would give me reasons to justify screaming injustice and gaining sympathy of the public.

He didn’t give me that. He had a different approach all together.

“Mrs. Hayes, I want to walk through the affidavit you submitted in the custody proceedings. The one describing Sedona’s behaviour during her final months in Chicago.” he said as he slid a folder across the

table between us.

“I remember it,” I said.

“You described her as withdrawn. Erratic.” He glanced down at the page. “You used the phrase ‘concerning emotional episodes.” He looked back up at me. “Were you aware, at the time you wrote that affidavit, that Sedona Preston was in the late stages of an undiagnosed illness during that exact period?”

I sat very still. I had expected this question. I had rehearsed an answer on the flight. In the cab. And even in the elevator. But I lost all of it,the moment I opened my mouth.

“I knew she wasn’t well,” I said. “I didn’t know the medical specifics.”

“Did Logan know?”

I thought about the hospital call. The one Sedona said she made to her husband who ad instead took Nick and Catherine to Disney world.

“I believe he did,” I said. “Eventually.”

“And he didn’t tell you.”

“No.”

“But you knew something was seriously wrong with her,” the detective said. He wasn’t unkind about it. He was just precise and blunt.

“And months later, after she’d left, after she’d been diagnosed and very nearly died, you wrote a sworn statement describing that same period of illness as instability. As a character flaw rather than a medical

crisis.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

I hadn’t had one on the porch either. When Sedona said almost the exact same thing to me. “I wasn’t trying

to hurt her.”

What She Kn

Claim

Mrs. Hayes turned swiftly and retorted, “I’m not asking about your intentions, Mrs. Hayes.” “I’m asking what you knew. When you knew it. And what you did with that knowledge once you had it.” He dropped pen down on the table almost silently yet it

“This matters for the investigation. Whether you were a willing participant in a pattern of concealment, or whether you were simply someone who didn’t ask the questions she should have asked.”

I sat with the difference between those two things for a long time. Longer than I think he expected me to.

I had spent years telling myself it was the second version. That I hadn’t known enough to be culpable.

That my silence had been ignorance, not complicity. That loving my son meant believing his story, even when part of me had always known it didn’t hold together.

Sitting across from a stranger with a kind face, I understood I no longer believed my own defence. I hadn’t for a while. I’d kept saying it anyway, the way you repeat something long after you’ve stopped feeling the truth of it.

I had known enough. I had known about the hospital call he ignored. I had watched Sedona come apart slowly across the marriage to my son and I had turned a blind eye to it. The alternative being that my son was, in some slow accumulating way, destroying the woman he had married. I had discarded the thought each time it came up.

I had not pulled any trigger. I had not hired the operative who watched her parents’ house, or built the financial trail that funnelled money toward a man with a knife, or made the call that put a stranger in a parking lot at six in the morning.

But I had spent years building the soft, forgiving ground that let Logan believe his own version of events was the only version that mattered. I had been the audience that never once asked him to defend himself properly.

“I think,” I said slowly, “I was complicit. Not in the way the law would define it, probably. But in every way that actually matters to me.”

The detective stool a glance at me. He wrote something in his jotter.

I called Sedona that evening.

I almost didn’t. I sat with my phone for nearly twenty minutes on my hotel bed. I rehearsed what I might say. Every version I built still had an angle folded into it somewhere. A justification tucked in sideways. A small ask buried inside the apology. Something that would let me feel afterward like I’d earned forgiveness in return.

I deleted all of it.

I put the phone down. I picked it back up ten minutes later and called with absolutely nothing prepared, which frightened me more than any of the rehearsed versions

had.

“Sherry,” she said when she answered. Careful. Guarded, after the porch, after everything that had passed between us since.

“I’m not calling for favour. I just need to say something, and you can hang up the second you’ve heard

24

What She Sach-

enough of it.”

A pause. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Plainly. As plainly as I knew how to say anything. “I knew you were sick, back then.

Claim

“I knew you had called and Logan hadn’t gone. I called what I saw instability instead of what it actually was. Because believing it was instability let me keep believing my son was simply difficulty, not someone capable of real harm. You’carry all of that alone for years. You’d nearly died because of it, I wrote a sworn statement that made things worse for you instead of better. Don’t forgive any of it. But I needed you to know that I have noted all. Even if it took losing everything to get there.”

Sedona was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I almost asked if she was still on the line.

“Thank you for saying that.”

“I don’t forgive you, Sherry. I honestly, I don’t think I will ever. But I believe you mean it. That’s different from forgiveness. It’s not nothing, though.”

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