Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 79

Confession Nights-2

She’d raised three children and buried a husband and navigated eight decades of life and had known that sometimes the best thing to do was sit with someone in silence, without forcing them to say anything before they could find the words for whatever they were carrying.

“Nick had a reaction tonight,” I said finally “Hives. Severe enough that we ended up in the emergency room.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s fine now. The hospital gave him IV antihistamines.” I turned the mug in my hands. “But Sedona’s cream wasn’t there. The one she made for his skin. She took it when she left, and the alternatives made it worse, and I didn’t-” I stopped. “I didn’t know enough. About his skin, his specific needs. I knew the broad outlines but not the details, because it wasn’t something that i had bothered to learn since it was all in Sedona’s head.”

Brooke was quiet, listening.

“She managed everything.” The words were coming slowly, not because I was uncertain about them but because each one had weight and I needed to set them down carefully.

“I don’t mean in the general sense of she ran the household. I mean specifically, things concerning his health, his diet, his environment. She built a system for him because he’s fragile in ways that required constant attention and she gave it to him and I thought-”

“You thought she was being excessive,” Brooke said. Not unkindly.

I stopped, because i needed to get my feelings under control before i continued speaking.

Brooke waited.

“I got her pregnant six months after I met her,” I said. “We got married quickly because it seemed like the right thing, and then Nick came early and everything became about his survival, and someone i just accepted her as a fixture in my life, someone who handled the home, while i managed the company, i never asked her if she was okay, or needed anything, whether the life we were building was what she would have chosen or she had simply found herself in a situation she could not walk away.”

“Did you love her?” Brooke asked. The question was direct, straight to the point and somehow free from judgement.