Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 63

Chapter 58: Early Hopes

“She called for Nick,” Jennifer said, her eyes wet with tears as she looked at me. “Her baby. She’s delirious with fever and she’s calling for her child and he’s not here and she thinks he hates her-”

“He doesn’t hate her,” I said, though I had no evidence for this beyond hope, because I had only seen him once and watched him grab onto his mum, before Sedona shrugged him off and I saw the look of confusion on his face.

That wasn’t a child who hated his mum and I refused to believe he was that good of an actor.

“He’s six. Six-year-olds don’t hate their mothers. They just say things they don’t mean when they’re upset. And they are also coached to say these things, either by someone they think it’s cool without knowing how hurtful words are, because they don’t suffer the consequences.”.

“We should find him,” my mother said suddenly. “Find Nick. Bring him here. Let Sedona see him before-” She stopped herself.

“Before what?” my father asked gently.

“Before it’s too late.” She said it very quietly, like speaking the fear softly would make it less real.

“It’s not going to be too late,” I said, refusing to accept any other alternative than this. My mum was beginning to lose hope but I refused to do so as well.

“She’s going to make it through this. And when she does, when she’s stable and healthy again, we’ll talk about Nick. About whether it’s right to bring him into this. But not now. Not while she’s fighting for her life. We wouldn’t want to traumatised the boy either seeing his mum like this and making this the last memory of her he gets to have, if and a big IF, if things goes sideways.”

We settled back into watching. The hours crawled past-4 AM, 5 AM, 6 AM. The sun started to rise over Seattle, pale sun light filtering through the observation room windows.

And sometime around 7 AM on the second day-something changed.

Sedona’s temperature started to drop.

Not dramatically at first. Just a tenth of a degree, then another. But it was dropping, consistently, the graph on the monitor showing a clear downward trend for the first time in forty-eight hours.

“Frank,” I called, and he was there within minutes, studying the monitors with an expression I couldn’t quite read.

“Her fever’s breaking,” he said, and there was optimism in his voice although he sounded cautious like believing in it would be a fluke and make it high again but I could see the hope in his eyes as he reviewed the charts.

“Vitals are stabilizing. Heart rate coming down, blood pressure normalizing-”

He kept talking but I stopped hearing him because I was watching Sedona through the glass. Her face was still flushed but less intensely. Her breathing had evened out, lost the harsh quality it had carried for two

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days. She looked… better. Not healthy, not by any stretch, but better than she had.

“Is she going to be okay?” my mother asked. “Frank, please-is she going to be okay?”

Clam

“I need to run more tests before I can say anything definitively. But if this trend continues like that with no decline, if her temperature stays down and her vitals remain stable, then-yes-she’s going to be okay. Her body accepted the treatment.” He turned to look at us. “This is the first genuinely hopeful sign we’ve had. I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but this is very, very good.”

My mother made a sound that was half-sob, hat-laugh. My father pulled her closer, and I saw his shoulders shaking slightly, saw him press his face against her hair.

Parker Preston, who I’d seen cry exactly three times in my entire life, was crying openly in a hospital observation room because his daughter’s fever had broken.

I stayed by the glass, watching Sedona sleep peacefully for the first time in two days, and let myself feel something I’d been afraid to feel since Chicago.

Hope. Real hope. She was going to make it.

Sedona’s POV

The world came back slowly, in pieces.

First was light-too bright, making me want to close my eyes again immediately. Then sound-steady beeping, quiet voices, the particular acoustic quality of a hospital room. Then sensation-clean sheets, a pillow under my head, the dull ache of my body reminding me it had been through something significant.

I opened my eyes fully and found my mother’s face inches from mine.

“Sedona.” She said my name like a prayer, like she’d been waiting to say it. “Oh, sweetheart. You’re awake.”

“How long?” My voice came out rough, my throat raw.

“Three days since the treatment. Two since your fever broke.” She was smoothing hair back from my forehead, the gesture automatic and soothing. “You’ve been drifting in and out but this is the first time you’ve seemed really lucid.”

I tried to take stock of my body. Everything hurt, but it was a diffuse ache rather than the sharp, specific pains I’d become used to. The burning sensation from the treatment was gone. The nausea was manageable.

“Am I-” I had to stop, had to swallow. “Did it work? Am I okay?”

“Dr. Mitchell ran tests this morning. He’ll want to explain everything himself, but Cameron said the tumor markers are down. Actually down, Sedona. The treatment is working.”

The information took a moment to process. Working. The treatment that had felt like dying, that had put me through forty-eight hours I only remembered in fever-dream fragments-it had actually worked.

“How much down?” I asked, cautiously trying not to give into the hope that was inside my chest trying to burst out as I knew better than to believe something completely when I was used to disappointment.

“I don’t know the specifics. But enough that Frank used the word ‘remarkable.” She was crying, I realized.

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