Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 68

Chapter 64: I Want Mummy

Sedona’s POV

I hadn’t been inside a hospital since I’d found Sedona there, standing looking sickly while talking to the nurse, since i walked away furious while she was dying and i pretended that i didn’t see the signs, more furious that i had caught her with a man she called Cameron and too hot tempered to think that she wouldn’t be cheating like i assumed and their base of operation happened to be a fucking hospital of all places.

Nick held my hand in the triage line, which he rarely did anymore-he’d been asserting his independence aggressively for the past year, part of growing up, part of the general rebellion that he had started against Sedona’s oversight, when he refused to let sedona fuss over him, Saying that he didnt need her hugs and kisses anymore, behaviours back then that I’d mistakenly encouraged. But tonight he held my hand and I didn’t comment on it.

The triage nurse assessed him quickly, took his vitals, asked the same questions the phone nurse had asked me. I gave the same incomplete answers that i had and i could see her judging silently with her eyes, what kind of father doesnt know anything about his child, his only child for that matter. But she was too polite to say anything.

She made a note and moved us to a treatment bay, and within twenty minutes a doctor had confirmed what I’d suspected and started Nick on IV antihistamines, which was the only thing that was going to bring the reaction under control at this point.

Nick cried when they put the IV in. Not loudly, just crying silently, the tears of a child who was already exhausted and this was one more thing that he had to put up with that he didn’t want to put up with.

I held his other hand and watched the nurse work, and said the things you said in these situations-you’re brave, almost done, it won’t hurt in a second-and felt completely useless.

After the IV was running, when Nick was reclined in the hospital bed with a cartoon playing on the television mounted high on the wall, he said it.

“I want Mommy.”

I kept my face carefully neutral. “I know, buddy.”

“I want her to be here.” He was looking at the cartoon but not watching it, but looking at it, gave him a reason to not look at me which was what he wanted.

“She always comes when I’m sick. She sits next to my bed and puts the cloth on my head and she tells me about the time she got food poisoning on a school trip and it’s really funny and it makes me not think about being sick.” He paused. “I don’t have anyone to tell me that story.”

“I could-”

“You don’t know it the way she tells it.” He pulled the hospital blanket up with his free hand, the IV line limiting his range of motion as he hissed, pain coursing through him as he continued speaking, focusing on what he was saying.

“She does different voices. She does the voice of the nurse at the school and she makes it really funny.”

I didn’t push it.

“Why did she leave? Nick asked. His voice was quiet but he’d turned to look at me now, really look at me, the same way Sedona did before.

“Doesn’t she love me anymore?”

The question was even more direct than I’d expected, delivered in a tone of genuine uncertainty, like he was asking something he truly didn’t know the answer to and believed I might.

I thought about what Brooke had told me. About the way Sedona had said goodbye. About Nick’s baby teeth left in their box. About the labels stitched into every suit I owned in her handwriting.

“She loves you,” I said. “She loves you more than anything. That has not changed.”

Nick looked at the ceiling, blinking. “Then why isn’t she here?”

I had no answer that would satisfy him. The truth was too large and too complicated and too full of my own failures to compress into something a six-year-old could hold. the truth was that i had belittled her and constantly treated her like a bore and unwanted in our family but she held on for as long as she could because she thought her marriage could be salvageable.

The truth was she was somewhere sick and alone-or not alone, but without us, which amounted to the same thing in my eyes –because she’d decided that leaving us was somehow better than making us watch her disappear.

Couldn’t tell him any of that.

“It’s complicated,” I said again, which was a coward’s answer and I knew it.