Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 87

Chapter 81: An Old Rival:

Sedona’s POV

He looked up, and his eyes were wet, which was something I’d seen from Cameron Preston approximately three times in my entire life. He was someone that rarely cries, not even when his legs were broken at 14 or when his best friend died of leukemia. It was a rare occurrence, and this was one of those rare

moments.

“I don’t have anything to say. I just-” He stopped. “I need a minute.”

“Take it.”

He took it, and the rest of us gave it to him, because that was the thing about family, you allow them to process it and you do not push.

After a while, he sat back in the chair and looked at me with an expression that was complicated in a way I couldn’t entirely read. But underneath the happiness, something else was present, he looked troubled about something else that he was processing but not related to this. Something I would have called preoccupied, if the word didn’t seem too small.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” He said it immediately, too immediately, the reflex of someone redirecting.

“Cameron.”

“Today is about the good news.” He looked at me steadily. “Everything else can wait.”

“Everything else.” I kept my eyes on him. “What else is there?”

“Sedona.” His voice was gentle but firm, the voice he used when he’d made a decision. “Let today be what it is. Please.”

I didn’t push it. Whatever he was carrying. I filed it away knowing Cameron had something to tell me and let it go—for now.

ľ

My mother had brought food, which she always did, as if feeding us was the most direct expression of love available to her.

“Mom,” Cameron said, and his voice had that helpless quality of someone undone by something small after holding together through the large things.

“Eat,” she said simply, and started ladling.

We ate together in my hospital room, the four of us, my father continuing the novel between spoonfuls, my mother watching everyone’s portions and making sure we all got second helpings and Cameron tense shoulders began to release, from whatever it was thinking about.

Rachel arrived at four with Molly on her hip and Enzo slightly behind her, carrying a tote bag that rattled with containers and Molly’s essential supplies and what appeared to be a very large number of books.

1/3

An Old Rival

Claims

“Frank’s nurse told me, Rachel said at the door, her eyes already bright. “About the markers. She wasn’t supposed to, but looked at her face when she came out of your room this morning and I asked her directly and she knew me long enough to-” She stopped.

“It’s true? What she said?”

“It’s true.”

She made the sound she made when she was processing something big and was not quite ready, she did not let out a cry, more like a big exhale and it showed as her eyes turned watery immediately. Then she crossed the room and handed Molly to Enzo and sat on the edge of my bed and took my face in both hands.

“Tell me,” she said.

I told her everything the doctor told me, the chart, the markers and the conclusions based on their findings. She listened with her hands still on my face and her eyes doing the thing they did when she was feeling something large and trying to stay present rather than disappearing into it.

When I finished, she took a breath. Let it out. Took another.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. You’re going to be all right.”

“That’s what the data suggests.”

“Don’t do that.” She dropped her hands to my shoulders. “Don’t qualify it. Just let me say it. You’re going to be all right.”

“I’m going to be all right,” I said.

She smiled, and it reached everything, and behind her could see Enzo’s expression-Enzo who had become a stranger turned friend, smile unabashedly at me at the thought that I was not dying anytime

soon.

Molly, unaware of the emotional weather of the room, had located my IV stand and was investigating it with the intense focus that babies normally had.

“Molly, no,” Rachel said, without turning around.

Molly looked at the IV stand, looked at her mother, looked at the IV stand. Made a decision, reached for it.

“Molly.” Enzo caught her, redirected, offered her a toy from the bag instead. She accepted this compromise with the pragmatism of someone who understood that some battles weren’t worth having and the toy was also interesting.

“She’s going to dismantle this hospital room,” I said.

“She’s going to dismantle every room she’s ever in,” Rachel said, with the tone of someone who had accepted this completely and found it more endearing than alarming. “It’s a personality trait, not a phase. Enzo keeps hoping she’ll grow out of it. He’s wrong.”

“I have been wrong about many things,” Enzo said pleasantly, settling Molly on his knee and beginning the work of keeping her entertained in a space that contained many things she wasn’t supposed to touch, which was a job all on its own.

2/3

An Old Rival

Claim

Iwas watching Molly attempt to make a case for why the remote control should belong to her and Enzo make a diplomatic counter-argument, when Enzo looked up and said, in the tone of someone who’d been waiting for the right moment, “We ran into someone on the way here.”

“Oh?” I wasn’t paying close attention-I was still watching Molly, who had abandoned the remote control debate and pivoted to demanding something from her bag with considerable urgency.

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