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.

“Yes.” I looked at my hands. “I thought she was anxious and controlling and she couldn’t let him be a normal kid. I said it to her. Multiple times. And my mother said it, and Nick eventually started saying it too, and I just-” I breathed out. “I let it stand. I never told him it was wrong. I never said that the person keeping him alive deserved better than being called the devil by her own son.”

“He said that.”

“At the hospital. When she was-when she’d just gotten the diagnosis and she came to find him, and she reached for his hand, and he said she was the devil and she was faking and he didn’t want her to touch him.”

Brooke was quiet for a long moment.

“He told me tonight that he didn’t mean it,” I said. “He was half-asleep, he was exhausted from the hives and the hospital, and he asked me to tell her he didn’t mean it. That he was just mad.” Something shifted in my chest, unstable. “He’s six. He said what he’d been taught was acceptable to say, and then he wondered why she left, and he cried in a hospital bed because she wasn’t there to put her cream on his skin.”

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

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Confession High-2

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