Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 82

Chapter 77: Drawing The Boundary Line

Logan’s POV

Cha

“I need to go to Seattle.” I’d decided on the drive home to be direct and firm about this, not to dress it up or present it sideways, like a suggestion for my mum to decide what she wanted to do about it.

Brooke had told me to stop managing things, to say what was true in the order it was true. “I believe Sedona is there. I’m going to find her.”

The silence on the other end was telling, it was different from Brooke’s silence, i could imagine my mum on the other end of the line trying to figure out how to turn this into something she could control.

“Logan.” Her voice had changed slightly from the careful tone she was using before as she continued something she’d already decided could not be argued with. “I understand that you’re upset. What you learned about her health is shocking, and of course your instinct is to-”

“I need someone to be here with Nick while I’m gone. Mrs. Peterson will manage the day-to-day but I need a family present. I do not want Mrs Peterson to be here alone with Nick, and Brooke is too old to be looking after Nick 24/7. I’m asking you to stay here.”

“I will absolutely stay with my grandson.” No hesitation there. Whatever else my mother was, she loved Nick genuinely and completely and was willing to spend time with him, it was his mother that she had her reservation about, which i could not understand. Nick was half Sedona as well as he was half mine.

“But Logan, I need to say this to you. What you’re planning-going to Seattle, chasing after a woman who has made it abundantly clear she wants no contact”

“She’s dying, Mom.”

“You don’t know that she’s dying. You know that she received a diagnosis. Diagnoses change, treatments-

“Stage three gastric cancer. Three months without treatment.” kept my voice flat, delivering the facts the same way the nurse at the hospital had told me.” That is not a minor sickness, neither can it be wished away with a prayer and a miracle, it can and will get worse if she hasn’t started treating it. She received that diagnosis while she was alone in a waiting room in Chicago General because I’d sent her calls to voicemail. She came home to our house and you were there, and you said things to her that I won’t repeat right now, and then she left. She signed divorce papers and she left and she’s been alone with this since

then.”

Another silence. Longer this time.

“I didn’t know,” Sherry said. Her voice was slightly shaky, like trying to show empathy, seeing that she could not argue me out of this.

I will admit that i wasn’t 100 percent nice to her. But i did not know about how serious this was. i thought she was trying to prove a point that you can’t manage without her, when there are far more better choices out there.”

12

Drawing The Boundary Line

Clam

Lelosed my eyes and tried not to lose my cool at my mum’s words. Whatever else I believed about what she’d done, I didn’t think she’d known about the cancer. That particular cruelty hadn’t been deliberate.

“No. But the things you said to her without knowing what situtaion she was currently in, made her feel bad about herself.” I wasn’t shouting, I’d made a decision on the drive home not to shout. “I need you to understand that. I’m not asking you to fall apart over it, and I’m not relitigating the argument we already had. I’m just asking you to understand what your part was, so that when Nick asks you about his mother- and he will ask, he asks every day-you say something honest.”

“Logan-”

“He told me last night that he didn’t mean what he said at the hospital. He was half-asleep and recovering from hives and he asked me to tell her. He’s six. He said what he’d heard adults say and he wants to take it back, and I need to go find his mother and tell her that before it’s-before there isn’t time.”

The silence this time lasted long enough that I thought she might not answer.

Then Sherry said, quietly, “I’ll be there this afternoon.”

“Thank you.”

“Logan.” A pause. “I don’t-I didn’t intend to drive her away. I want you to know that. I genuinely believed I was protecting this family.”

“I know you believed that.”

“I was wrong.” The words came out stiffly from her mouth like someone who had been forced at gunpoint to apologize.

“About her place in this family. I see that now. I saw it before now, if I’m being honest, but I-” She stopped. “I was wrong.”

I hadn’t expected that, exactly. I’d expected her to reframe it and make her look like the victim, this was not what i had planned for.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. Just find her. And when you do-tell her I’m sorry. You don’t have to, and she may not want to hear it from you on my behalf. But if there’s an opportunity. Tell her.”

I said I would, and meant it, and hung up.

୮

The investigator called back that afternoon, earlier than I’d expected.

Nick was awake by then, installed on the couch with a blanket and a cartoon and a bowl of plain rice that was all his stomach was willing to accept after the previous night.

“I found her,” Reeve said.

The words hit me in the chest before I was ready for them.

“Tell me.”

23

Drawing The Boundary Line

Clam

“Sedona Claire Preston. That’s her birth name. Preston. Her father is Parker Preston-you’ll know the name.” He was right, I did know the name, distantly, in the way you knew something about distantly wealthy families but are not particulary close to. “The Prestons have been a fixture in Pacific Northwest business and philanthropy for three generations. Her brother is Cameron Preston, thirty, currently runs the Pacific division of the family’s investment group.” A pause.

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