Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 67

Chapter 62: Making It Worse

Logan’s POV

Mrs. Peterson went back to the pharmacy. I sat on the edge of the tub and kept Nick company, which was an experience in humility. ‘He didn’t want to talk, or he did want to talk but didn’t know what to say to me, which amounted to the same uncomfortable silence. He sat on the counter scratching carefully, methodically, like he’d learned not to break the skin but needed some relief from the pressure.

“Nick. Stop scratching.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Try.”

“You try having bumps on your whole body and see if you can stop.”

That was fair, and I didn’t push it.

The second cream burned too. Different ingredients but the same result-Nick’s skin rejecting it within minutes, the welts darkening and spreading. By the time Mrs. Peterson returned from her second pharmacy run, the hives had moved from his arms and neck down across his torso. I found them when I checked, lifting his shirt to see how far they’d spread, and the sight of his small body mapped with those angry red welts did something to my chest that I hadn’t expected.

“I want Mom’s cream,” Nick said. It was the first time he’d said it directly, clearly, without the careful circumspection he’d been using all morning. Just the bare statement. “Why isn’t Mom’s cream here? She always keeps it in the cabinet.”

“She left,” I said, and immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say-too blunt, too simple, not enough context for a six-year-old to process.

Nick looked at me. His expression went through several things in quick succession-confusion, something that looked like hurt, something I didn’t have a name for.

“Why did she leave?”

“It’s complicated.”

“That’s what adults say when they don’t want to explain,” he said. Which was accurate. He’d probably heard Sedona say it.

I looked at my son sitting on the bathroom counter, covered with hives and I had no answers to give him. Nothing that would make sense. Nothing that would help.

“Let’s try the oat bath,” Mrs. Peterson said, reappearing in the doorway with a box of colloidal oatmeal. “Mrs. Hayes used this as well, in combination with the cream. It might help with the itching in the meantime.”

Nick let himself be helped into the bath without much protest, which told me how miserable he was. He usually resisted bathtime because he was six and that was what six-year-olds did. The compliance was

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Making It Werse

its own signal, that he was suffering.

Claim

+ sat on the closed toilet lid while Mrs. Peterson got him settled, because leaving felt wrong and I didn’t

know what else to do.

“Can you call Mom?” Nick asked, from the bath. He was looking at the ceiling, his arms floating in the milky oat water. “And ask her what cream to use?”

“Her phone’s disconnected.”

“Then how do we reach her?”

“I’m working on it.”

Another look. Six-year-olds were, I was discovering, extremely good at communicating skepticism without words. He’d probably learned that too from Sedona, I thought suddenly. Sedona had a particular look she used when she thought something I’d said was inadequate, a look I’d spent three years dismissing as criticism. Nick had apparently inherited it.

“The itching’s not stopping,” he said.

“I know.”

“Is there anything else you can do? To get it to stop, you are my dad, you are supposed to fix this, not make it worse. Can you do something?”

I had nothing. I was a man who ran a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, who had people around the clock to solve problems, who had built something from nothing through sheer stubborn intelligence-and I couldn’t stop my son’s skin from rebelling and breaking out into hives from a skin infection or something even worse because the woman who knew how to manage it had left, and she’d left because I’d made it impossible to stay, and she’d taken her researched homemade remedy with her because it was hers, because I’d never once asked her to show me how to make it.

“I’ll figure something out,” I said.

Nick closed his eyes. “Okay, Dad.”

By afternoon, it was clear the oat bath and the fragrance-free moisturizer Mrs. Peterson had found had bought us some time but not solved anything. The hives had spread further. Nick was miserable.

He’d tried to watch television and couldn’t focus. He’d tried coloring and kept stopping to scratch. He ate almost nothing at lunch. He fell asleep on the couch around two and I let him sleep because it was the only time he wasn’t aware of the itching, and woke him an hour later looking worse, the hives more pronounced, his eyes swollen slightly around the edges.

“The histamine response is escalating,” Mrs. Peterson said quietly, beside me, while Nick sat dazed on the couch. “The oral antihistamine I gave him this morning isn’t sufficient. Mrs. Hayes had a different strength -prescription-level. I can see if the pharmacy-”

“I’ll call the pediatrician.”

I called. The pediatrician’s office put me through to an advice nurse who listened to my description and asked several questions I couldn’t answer about Nick’s specific allergy history, about what Sedona had typically used, about whether I knew what had triggered this particular outbreak. I didn’t know. I didn’t

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