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.

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.

“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 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.

I was 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.

“Someone who asked about you,” Rachel said, and her voice had shifted slightly. Like she was trying to figure out how to say this without setting off warning bells, Like she was trying to prepare me for something unexpected,

I looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“We were in the lobby, coming up, and this man-” She paused. “Enzo knew him. From the circuit. He said he’d heard from someone that you were here, that you were being treated, and he’d come to-he wanted to know if you’d see him.”

“Who?”

Enzo looked at me with an expression that was part amusement and part genuine curiosity about how I’d react. “Dante Wells.”

The name landed in the room and rearranged everything for a moment.

Dante Wells.

I hadn’t heard that name in years. Hadn’t let myself think about it in years, had packed it away in the same compartment where I kept my rackets and my trophies and the particular version of myself that had existed before everything had changed.