Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 72

Chapter 67: Catherine & Not Sedona

Logan’s POV

This was the first that Nick was hostile to Catherine, normally he would be over her, but now he was refusing to eat her food, i ‘did not want to read too much into it. Nick was not in a good headspace, being sick and uncomfortable would do that to anymore.

I let it go, or I set it aside-I wasn’t sure which. There was something in his face that was asking me not to push this, not right now, not here. Something that was asking me to let him have this small quiet refusal without turning it into a lesson about gratitude. He was a well behaved child, if he was acting out, then that meant that there was something causing it, and i would find out the reason, but not when he is in this headspace.

He was six, and he was in a hospital bed, and the woman he actually wanted to take care of him because she was aware of what he needed and everyone else was taking a guess work, making his suffering a lot worse than it was supposed to be.

He was probably angry that Sedona wasn’t here and taking it out on Catherine who was trying her best.

Catherine came back with crackers from the nurse’s station and a cup of apple juice, and set them on Nick’s bedside table without ceremony or making a deal out of it, she arranged it in a way that it was closer for him to reach it.

Nick said thank you, clearly and correctly, and ate three crackers with focused concentration, looking at the television.

“Better?” she asked.

“Mm.”

She returned to her chair.

The three of us occupied the room with the particular awkwardness of people who had different reasons to be there and different amounts of entitlement to the space. Nick eating crackers. Catherine on her phone again, giving us quiet. Me watching my son and trying to calculate what I owed Kim, what I’d failed to give him, what could still be repaired.

“Logan.” Catherine’s voice, low. Nick had dozed off again, the crackers half-finished, the apple juice untouched. “Can I say something?”

“Go ahead, what is it?” i replied giving her the nod as she spoke.

“The soup is on the counter. If Nick decides he wants it, it’ll still be warm for another hour in the container. She picked up her coat from the back of the chair and looked at Nick sleeping one more time, and her expression had something in it that I recognized as genuine-not performed.

Whatever else, Catherine had genuinely wanted to be good to him. Had tried, in the ways she knew how. But Nick was not taking it from her at the moment and she knew when she was overstaying.

“I will be checking in, and maybe when he is better and back home, I will come again. i don’t think me being here is productive for Nick’s health at the moment.”

“It’s not you, he is just not comfortable because he has been in pain.”

“I know i am not Sedona, you do not need to cover up, it was clear, that Nick did not want me here, he wanted Sedona and took out his frustration on me.”

“I am sorry.” i said because it was the polite thing to say, when nothing else could fit.

It just hadn’t been what he needed from her.

“I hope you find her,” she said. “I mean that, Logan. I hope she’s okay and I hope you find her. Nick needs to talk to her, i think he will feel better.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said.

“I should have asked more questions,” Nick said. He sounded older than six when he said it, or maybe exactly six, which was sometimes older than I thought.

“About stuff she did. Why she did it and what was her purpose for doing it, i didn’t bother to ask or take any interest in it, she was my mum afterall I just thought she’d always be there.”

“We both did,” I said.

He looked at me with that took he had apparently inherited from Sedona.

“Are you going to find her, Dad? Actually? Not just trying but actually finding her?”

“Yes,” I said, with more certainty than I had an immediate right to. “Actually.”

He held my eyes for a moment, testing the word for truth, the way he’d learned to do because the adults in his life had given him reasons to check.

Then he nodded, and looked back at the television, and reached for the crackers again.

“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll wait.”

I stayed in that chair beside his bed until the doctor came to discharge him two hours later, and I carried him to the car while he slept against my shoulder, and I drove home through Chicago in the dark thinking about star-shaped pasta and questions neither of us had thought to ask while there was still time.

Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I stop waiting.