Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 75

Chapter 70: Looking For Solutions.

CATHERINE

“It will keep failing,” Alina said, without cruelty, just blantantly stating the facts that i clearly did not want to hear from her.

“He’s six years old and he’s been built by someone else and you’re not willing to do what would actually change that to make him depend on you instead by changing what he is used to, to something better. So yes, give him another chance if it helps you feel you tried your best with him. But start researching schools now. Have the information ready when you need it.”

I exhaled. “My season starts in eight weeks.”

“I know.”

“I’m supposed to be back for training in six. My shoulder-”

“Your shoulder is healed,” she said, and the tone shifted slightly-not hard, but exact. “I spoke with your physio last week, Catherine. She said you’re at ninety-two percent capacity and improving. You’ve been cleared for full practice for three weeks.”

I said nothing.

“You’re stalling,” Alina said cutting through the excuses.

“I understand why. But you cannot hold a professional tennis career in suspension indefinitely while you wait for a billionaire to fall in love with you on a timeline that suits you. The season will not wait.”

“I’m not asking the season to wait. I’m asking for six more weeks.”

“To accomplish what, specifically? What does six weeks get you that three months hasn’t?”

I pressed my fingers against my eyes. What would the six weeks extra get me.

I needed Logan to stop looking backward, searching for a woman who can be long dead by now, long enough to look at what was in front of him. I needed Nick to stop being a daily monument to Sedona’s absence and move on with his life and become, if not an ally, at least neutral with the fact that his father deserves happiness and i was capable of giving Logan that happiness.

I needed the guilt in Logan’s eyes when he looked at me to shift into something else, the way he looked at me, when sedona was still a background invisible character.

Six weeks. Was that enough for me to accomplish all this?

“According to him, Sedona is dying. If he finds her-”

“If he finds her and she’s dying, it’s over,” Alina said flatly. “You understand that. If he finds her and she has maybe two months left and a cancer diagnosis, Logan Hayes is going to spend every one of those months trying to repair what he broke. You become irrelevant to him, he will abandon you.”

“I know.”

“Then stop him from finding her.” Said simply, like it was obvious.

“I can’t stop a private investigator who-”

*I want Mommy. Why did Mommy leave? Doesn’t she love me anymore?*

I’d heard that too, standing in the hallway. Nick’s voice, asking the question that I did not know how to explain without him seeing me as the bad guy.

I hadn’t wanted that. Let me be clear on that. I hadn’t wanted a child grieving his mother. I’d wanted the mother to simply be less present. I’d wanted her to be replaceable.

She wasn’t replaceable.

But Nick was six, and six-year-olds grew and changed and adapted, and the period of acute grief for a mother who had left would not last forever.

The boy he was now, waiting by the door with his dark eyes and his careful polite rejection of my soup- that boy was a phase. He would grow, he would age more, what hurt him now would fade with time, if I stayed, if I secured my position, before Logan guilt would triumph over everything else.

“I’ll give Nick one more real attempt,” I said.

“Something he actually wants. Not a meal he didn’t ask for. Something personal-find what he’s interested in, find a way in through that.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“Then we discuss the school ‘option.”