Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 80

Chapter 74: Love or Indifference?

Logan’s POV

I sat with it.

“I don’t know what I thought that word meant, said slowly. “Catherine felt like what I thought love was supposed to feel like, this unexplainable pull towards her, that feeling that told me that she was unfinished business. Sedona felt like-” I searched for it.

“Like something I relied on without acknowledging I was relying on it. Like the foundation of a building. You don’t think about the foundation until it starts to fail.”

“And now?” She prompted as i dragged my hand across my face and replied.

“Now I’m sitting in your living room at two in the morning because my son is sleeping in a house that smells like the woman who made it feel like home, and I don’t know where she is, and I am terrified.” The last word came out wrong, came out large. “I’m terrified that I’m not going to find her in time. I’m terrified that the three months her doctor gave her are running out while I’m here being useless, and she’s somewhere being sick and alone-or not alone, but without her son, without-”

“Logan.” Brooke’s voice, quiet and certain. “Come here.”

I looked at her.

“Come here,” she said again.

I crossed to where she was sitting, and she put her small arms around me the way she had when I was a child and my parents were busy with things that were more important, the way she’d been doing since before I had language for what it meant to be held by someone who loved you without condition.

And I fell apart completely.

This wasn’t how i cried when i had been alone in the hospital parking lot scared shitless for the first time i could remember in a long while. This was something I hadn’t done in her presence since I was eleven years old and my grandfather had died, and I’d come to Brooke because she understood grief better than anyone else.

She held me and said nothing, which was exactly correct, which was exactly what I needed. Going to my mother with this was asking for trouble, shirley was never the one to deal with emotions, even as a kid growing up, it had been my grandmother who had always been there for me.

I cried for what felt like a very long time. For Nick in his hospital bed asking why Mommy left. For the baby teeth that Sedona had abandoned in the box she left behind, i also cried about the labels in my suits that i had worn to meetings, not knowing they were there, i cried for the fact that my wife called me to inform me something heart-wrenching, and i had shut her down, saying she was inconveniencing me.

When it had subsided enough to breathe normally, I stayed where I was for another moment, silently savouring the hug and Brooke kept her arms around me, and the tea had gone cold on the table, neither of us saying anything in the moment, just silently processing things together.

I don’t know how to find her,” I said, into her shoulder. “She’s disappeared. She planned it, she was careful, she left nothing behind.”

“Seattle,” Brooke said. “She mentioned the rain being different there.”

“I know. My lawyer is working on it. But she has help and seattle is a big place and the investigator has not made any new discoveries-”

“She doesn’t want to be found by the version of you that existed when she left,” Brooke said gently.

“That doesn’t mean she can never be found by a different version.”

I pulled back and looked at her. In the light, my grandmother looked the same as always, certain of what she was saying.

“What if it’s too late?” I asked. “What if she’s too sick, or she’s too The words got stuck. “What if I’ve used up all the chances I had?”

“That’s the more important question,” Brooke said. “Anyone with enough resources can find a person. What the difficult part is knowing what to say to the person when you have found them..”

She looked at me steadily as she continued speaking, dragging out the thing that i had refused to think about.

“What are you going to say to her, Logan? When you’re standing in front of her and she’s looking at you with hurt and anger and pain-what do you intend to say?”

I’d been thinking about the logistics. The search, i had been thinking about the finding, not what comes after that.

“i am going to tell her nothing but the truth,” I said. “Everything I should have said before she left. That I failed her and that I let my mother and my history, with Catherine rewrite what was in front of me.”

I looked at the cold tea on the table. “That I’m sorry. That I know sorry doesn’t fix any of it, but that I need her to hear it from me directly.”

“And then?”

“And then whatever she decides. If she-” The next part was harder to say. “If she wants me there, for whatever time there is, I’ll be there. If she tells me to leave, I’ll leave, but I’ll make sure she has what she needs regardless. I won’t make her go through this alone.”

“You can’t buy your way into her forgiveness.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not sure you do Logan, because that is not someone you are. You’ve spent your life solving problems with resources, Logan. Money, influence, the right person called at the right time. And those things have their place. But Sedona isn’t a problem to be solved. She’s a person who trusted you and was let down in very specific ways, and what she needs from you isn’t resources. It’s something you can’t buy and can’t delegate.”