Chapter 44: The Backstory Of How they Happened.
Sedona’s POV
“He made me laugh,” Rachel said, and there was something in her voice that made me look at her more closely. She sounded wistful, like she was looking back on a fond memory.
“During the worst of it, months after your sudden disappearance when I was imagining all these terrible scenarios about what might have happened to you, Enzo would say these completely absurd things that would catch me off guard and make me laugh despite myself. And then one day I realized I was looking forward to seeing him, like actually wanting to spend time with him. Not because he might have news about you or he has a new lead he wanted us to look into but just because I wanted to see him.”
“When did you know?” I asked turning to face my ex fiance Enzo, who looked at me with a complicated look on his face, like he was trying to be mindful of my feelings concerning this. “That it was more than friendship?”
He was quiet for a moment, considering. “There was a day-about four months after the wedding-that-wasn’t. Rachel and I had met for coffee, which we’d been doing every week by then, and she mentioned casually that she’d been on a date the night before. Some lawyer her mother had set her up with, hoping to get them into a relationship with each other as the man was from a very high class family. Very accomplished, apparently. Rich family.”
“Michael Peterson,” Rachel supplied the information, adding in the missing bits as she rolled her eyes remembering that man.
“Sedona he was the worst and I felt my mum intentionally did it just to make me miserable. He was absolutely dull. Talked about himself for ninety minutes straight, his winnings, his 99 streak of success and no failures yet, how he was raised in a traditional home and wanted a traditional wife, basically listing what he rather have me doing.”
“I hated him,” Enzo said simply, continuing from where she stopped. “Immediately and irrationally, because there was no valid reason for me to hate him even though he was a douchebag from the sound of it. I’d never met him, knew nothing about him except what Rachel had told me, and I wanted to find him and tell him he wasn’t good enough for her. Which was when I realized that I’d developed some very inconvenient feelings that wasn’t right or appropriate given the context back then.”
“He didn’t tell me right away,” Rachel continued. “He spent three more months agonizing about it, having sleepless nights and getting drunk, convinced that pursuing me would be a betrayal of you somehow. Meanwhile, I’d figured out my own feelings but was also convinced that acting on them would be wrong because you were still missing and it felt disrespectful to fall in love with your former fiancé when we didn’t even know if you were alive.”
“So we were both miserable and pining for each other while pretending to just be friends,” Enzo finished, clapping his hand together as he added. “Very Italian of me. Very melodramatic.”
“What changed?” I shifted slightly, adjusting Molly’s weight as she stirred against my shoulder before settling again as she kept sleeping, the conversation lulling her into a much deeper sleep rather than waking her up.
Rachel and Enzo exchanged another look, and this time I saw something darker in it, it wasn’t exactly pain but something close to it.
“Your parents held a memorial,” Rachel said quietly.
“Eighteen months after you disappeared. Not a funeral, exactly, since there was no… since you weren’t…” She stopped, visibly struggling with the words.


VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABEL
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife!