Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 46

Chapter 44: The Backstory Of How they Happened.

Sedona’s POV

+25 Points

“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.

1/3

< The Backstory of How They Got Together

+25 Points

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.

“Since there was no body,” I finished for her, my voice flat, spitting out the forbidden words that she couldn’t bring herself to speak. “They thought I was dead.”

“We didn’t know what to think,” Rachel said. “Eighteen months with no contact, no sightings, no credit card usage, nothing. The investigators your father hired said that typically if someone was going to resurface, they’d have done it by then. They suggested that we should consider the possibility that something had happened to you. That maybe you’d met with foul play, or had an accident somewhere remote, or–”

“Or decided that disappearing permanently was more preferable to coming back,” I said.

“That was my theory,” Enzo said. “Not foul play. I didn’t believe that you were dead. You did nothing bad to anyone that would decide to have you killed. I never believed that theory. But I thought perhaps you’d started a completely new life somewhere, that you’d made a clean break and had no intention of ever returning. Which, to be clear, I understood. Your family’s expectations were… Something that you struggled with.”

“The memorial wasn’t really for you,” Rachel continued, not really, it was a way for us to acknowledge what we had lost, and if we could find a way to keep living in your honour instead of just waiting indefinitely.”

I closed my eyes briefly, imagining it. My parents, my brother, Rachel and Enzo and everyone I’d known, gathered somewhere at the gloomy ends of a cemetery filled with other graves as they were there to mourn a version of me that they’d made up from absence of the real me. “That must have been terrible.”

“It was one of the worst days of my life,” Rachel said simply. “Your mother couldn’t stop crying about it, she was inconsolable that day. Your father gave this speech about you-about how proud he was of you, how he regretted not telling you that more often, how he wished he’d listened when you tried to tell him you weren’t ready for marriage.” Her voice wavered.

“Cameron didn’t speak. He just stood at the front holding your tennis racket-the one you used at the junior nationals and had given it to him as a good luck charm-and I think everyone there understood that he was barely holding himself together. But he didn’t want to fall apart in front of everyone else.”

The image was almost unbearable as ears rolled down my eyes as I didn’t wipe it but I spoke.

“I didn’t know. I never meant for-”

“We know,” Enzo said cutting me short as he nodded his head slowly.

“We know that now. But Sedona, you have to understand what it was like for those of us you left behind. The not-knowing was its own kind of torture. At least with death, we were certain of this. Instead of just waiting, hovering around this endless question mark that nobody had the answer to.”

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