Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 77

Chapter 72: Reminiscing The Past

Logan’s POV

Clam

In the study, I found the whiskey that had been left on the bar cart and poured some without measuring the quantity. After getting’satisfied with the quantity, I sat down in the chair behind

my

desk.

This was the same desk where i had opened Sedona’s financial records, and had called my private investigator and asked him to find her.

I drank the whiskey. Poured another.

The private investigator had found nothing, up till now, it has been getting over to two weeks and he had no new lead for me. The bookseller had given me the word Seattle. He was working on it.

Marcus Reeve had told me she’d been helped by someone who knew what they were doing and had been doing it for a long time to become very good at this, that the disappearance wasn’t improvised, that someone had planned it carefully enough to leave no trail.

Cameron. The man at the hospital. Tall, controlled, hand on Sedona’s shoulder. He’d been there for days and nights, she’d said, which I had turned it in my head into something it apparently wasn’t. i thought she was sleeping with him, when he was the only one who had been supporting her through her diagnosis while i was busy recreating memories with Catherine.

I did not know the man aside from his name, but i knew that he had to be her family at the very least. She had a family, a family she’d hidden, which meant she’d had support I’d never known about, which meant she’d been less alone than I’d let myself believe.

Had she called them, before she called me? On that day at Disneyland, the day she’d called four times while I was riding roller coasters with Catherine, had she called her family first because she knew that i would not make time for her and accuse her of intentionally sabotaging the day with Catherine? Or had she called me first, called me because I was her husband and she still, despite everything, expected that maybe i would show up for her, but i had disappointed her again.

The second question was worse than the first. Because i already knew the answer, she had called me first.

ľ

I’d been the person she’d called from a hospital waiting room when she was about to receive the worst news of her life. She’d called me. Not her family, not a friend, me. And I’d told her to stop being selfish and hung up.

She’d called me first.

I poured a third whiskey and didn’t drink it, just held the glass and looked at the window, at my own reflection in the dark glass, realizing that i looked nothing like the confident capable, billionaire CEO, that i was often described as. In that place was me pale, disheveled, the suit jacket abandoned somewhere, shirtsleeves rolled up. I looked like I was coming apart. I looked like someone who had been very certain about his own certainity for a very long time and had discovered that i had been wrong about everything that i thought i knew.

What I’d missed. The scope of what I’d missed.

13

Reminiscing the Rast

Claim

I’d walked through my own house for six years and seen a woman who was anxious and controlling and difficult, who made everything complicated which made me irritated with her, i saw a miserable woman who couldn’t accept Catherine’s presence with grace, who was jealous and unreasonable about everything.

I had seen nuisance when all the evidences left behind by her pointed to pure devotion.

The labels in my suits. Sedona had sewn care labels into every suit she’d organized in my wardrobe and I had worn those suits to boardroom meetings and business dinners and a gala where Marcus had told me my wife was devoted to me and I’d deflected it, changed the subject, been vaguely embarrassed by the observation.

She’d sewn that into my clothing with her own hands. She’d been rooting for me, silently, invisibly, stitching encouragement into the lining of everything I wore because she knew I wore these suits to the things that mattered and she wanted to be there in some form even when she wasn’t.

I’d never thanked her. I hadn’t known about it until I’d gone looking, until she was gone and I’d started actually paying attention to the space she’d occupied.

Nick’s baby teeth. Nick’s teeth in their labeled tissue paper, each one dated, who had stayed up each time late enough, just to make it more magical for our two year old who believed in the tooth fairy.

She’d left those behind. She’d taken the cream she’d made for his skin, because she believed she was never coming back, and she hadn’t wanted to take those from the house where he would grow up without her.

My son had told his dying mother that she was the devil. He’d looked her in the eye in a hospital corridor and told her he wished Catherine was his mother instead, and she had stood there and accepted it calmly, her heart breaking, and I had stood there and let it happen.

I’d let it happen.

I hadn’t corrected him. Hadn’t pulled him aside later and explained that you didn’t speak to your mother that way, that the person who had kept him alive through two months in the NICU and six years of navigating his body’s delicate problems deserved more than cruelty from him.

I’d let it stand, instead of making him apologize to her because it had been convenient, because it had aligned with the narrative I’d been building in my head where Sedona was the difficult one and Catherine was uncomplicated and I was simply making a reasonable choice about where to spend my time.

Six years old, Nick had said tonight. I was just mad. I didn’t mean any of it.

He’d been performing for adults who’d told him it was acceptable. Children followed what they see. He had watched his mother being sidelined by me, for Catherine more and had internalized it, had listen to his grandmother Sherry describe his mother as a placeholder, of being told that his mother’s protectiveness was the problem rather than the system she’d built to keep him whole.

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