Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 39

Reunion With Her Parents

Chapter 37. Reunion With Her Parents

Sedona’s POV

I could feel his shoulders shaking as he bugged me tightly.

“No.” His voice was rough, filled with emotions that were present in his voice, that I hadn’t known was possible in my years of being his daughter.

“No, Sedona. You are not in the wrong here, we are. We are the one who made you feel that you were worth more to our business than in being our child, we were the reason why you decide to run away, risking everything out there. We’re sorry. We pushed too hard, we didn’t listen, we made you feel like you had no choice but to do what we had asked you, irrespective of your feelings towards it.”

He pulled back to look at me, and I saw with something like shock that his eyes were wet as he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand as I saw my mum do the same, giving me a watery smile, her hand reaching out to touch me again, like she was making sure that I wasn’t a mirage or a fever dream..

My father continued speaking, making me look at him as he added “No arranged marriage was worth losing you. Not any marriage, not any business arrangement, not anything. We should have seen that then. We should have known.”

“We both made mistakes,” my mother said, her arms still around me, the three of us standing in the front garden in the Seattle afternoon, our neighbors probably watching the show, eating popcorn from their

windows.

“All of us. We all made mistakes and crossed lines that shouldn’t be crossed, hurting ourselves in the process. And we have time now to do better. We have time.”

Time. The word landed differently for me than it did for her. She meant it as abundance-we have all the time we need, we can take this slowly, we can rebuild. I heard it as scarcity. I heard the three months my Chicago doctor had given me. I heard the stage three that Cameron had told Dr. Mitchell about in the car on the phone while I pretended to be asleep.

But I nodded, and I leaned into my mother’s arms, and for the first time since I’d received a diagnosis in a sterile hospital room while my husband was riding a roller coaster with another woman and my son-

For the first time, I felt something that wasn’t fear or exhaustion or grief. I felt safe. And deep down, a part of me knew that I was going to be just alright no matter what the future brought.

That night, I was taken back to my room that had been preserved for me, none of my things taken out and I slept in my childhood bedroom.

Cameron had arranged it without telling me-the bed made up with the soft white linen I’d always preferred, because the cotton ones made my skin break out in hives, and I would be restless, my tennis trophies still on their shelves gathering dust they’d apparently gathered for five years without anyone moving them, the framed photo on my nightstand still the one of me and Cameron at the junior nationals when I was fifteen, both of us grinning, both of us believing the world would simply comply with what we

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<Reunion Walther Parents

wanted froin it.

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tay in that bed, in that room, surrounded by the quiet sounds of a house with other people in it-my parents’ low voices from down the hall, the sound of Cameron on the phone in the guest room, and I let myself cry.

This wasn’t the desperate broken kind of crying I did after hearing the diagnosis in the hospital, or the kind that I cried in Logan’s home after Sherry had told me point blank, that I was nothing but a placeholder and my marriage was on its last leg.

This was something different. This was grief with hope mixed into it, feeling both sad and relieved which seemed to be impossible but the accurate description of what I was feeling.

I thought of Nick.

I thought about him every day, in the margins of all other thoughts in the spaces between sleeping and waking when I had nothing to do but stare at the ceiling, counting the white tiles trying to stop myself from thinking about Nick.. But I could still see his face at the hospital, lit up for one unguarded mornent when he’d seen me. The way he’d reached for my hand before I’d pulled away from him. The hurt in his eyes that I’d put there deliberately because I’d told myself I didn’t have the resources left to absorb his ambivalence. But then I had seen Catherine with them and came to the bitter conclusion that he might have not even realized that I wasn’t home since Catherine had been with him occupying his days with fun. Him lifting up was nothing more than him just seeing a familiar place in a place he didn’t expect to see them, it was nothing more than that. The truth hurts but I held on tight to it, wondering if I was secretly a masochist.

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