Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 89

Chapter 83: Pick Up A Racket
Sedona’s POV
He sat. He settled his arms on his knees looking at me directly, and I looked back, and we were quiet for a while, but it was not uncomfortable. It was comfortable, in the same way that two people who understood each other without saying a word was.
“I looked for you,” he said. “After you stopped competing. I asked around the circuit, I asked people who would have known what happened to you, if you had changed teams or had personal issues. Nobody knew anything.”
“I left pretty thoroughly,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. I had not given anyone a heads-up. I was just gone, one day. Not even my coach got a warning and had to deal with the fall out alone.
“I noticed.” A pause, as his eyes searched my face as if he would be able to get the answers from there. “Why?”
The question was direct, the way he’d always been direct, not bothering to hide his curiosity when he wanted to know about something.
“Family stuff,” I said. “Complicated family stuff that felt less complicated if I could just-start over somewhere.”
He nodded, like that was something he understood without requiring details. “And now you’re back.”
“And now I’m back for good this time around, it took a while for me to realize that I did not have to leave them in the first place.”
He looked at the room again, at the people in it-my parents, Cameron, Rachel.
“You’re not alone,” he said.
“No.” I looked at my mother, who was watching Dante Wells with the particular assessment she applied to everyone new, measuring without being obvious about it. “No, I’m not.”
“Good.” He said it simply, and meant it simply, the same way he’d said everything-without performance.
“You’re top five now,” I said.
“four,” he said, with the faint self-deprecating correction of someone who’d learned that precision mattered in his world and had let it bleed into everything else.
“I heard you won Miami last year.”
“And lost the final in Paris.”
“But won Miami.”
“But won Miami,” he confirmed. He looked at me. “You could have been there. On the circuit, I mean. What you had at seventeen-” He stopped. “I still think about that match sometimes. You should have beaten
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Pick Up A Backer-
me, By rights, by everything that match was, you should have beaten me.”
“You won seven-five,” I said.
“I won seven-five because you cramped in the second game of the third set and I served wide and you couldn’t reach it. If you hadn’t cramped-” He shook his head.
Claim
“I was ready for another set. I was ready for two more sets. You were going to take me, and we both knew
it.”
I’d never talked about that match with anyone who’d been in it. I’d talked about it with Cameron, who’d been watching from the stands, but I doubt Cameron would remember all the people that I had served against. I’d talked about it with Rachel, who’d flown in for it. But not with Dante, not with the person across the net, not with the person who’d had the closest view to what was actually going on that day
“I thought about it for years,” I said. “Whether that match was the one. Whether I could have-” I stopped. “I know now that I wasn’t going to get another chance regardless, because of the family situation, but I thought about it for a long time.”
“It wasn’t the last match we would have had,” he said. “That’s what I kept thinking, after that game, that I might have won that round and did a victory dance to make you more angry on purpose but I knew that there were going to be more. The regional was going to be one of many and I was going to have to work for every single one of them, and then you were just-” He spread his hands slightly. “Gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For leaving without-I should have told people. I should have told more people that I was going.”
“It wasn’t mine to be told,” he said. “Your reasons were your reasons. I just-” “I just wanted you to know that it mattered. You mattered to me in ways that I did not let it show and it would have mattered more if you had stayed.” He met my eyes. “That’s all. That’s what I came to say.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it with everything I had.
He stayed for another half hour, and the conversation shifted and opened up, became easier-my mother asked about the circuit and he answered with the easy generosity of someone who liked talking about what he did, Enzo contributed a story about a tournament they’d both played that had gone extremely badly for reasons that turned out to be funny in retrospect, Molly fell asleep against Rachel’s shoulder with the absolute trust of a child who’d decided this was a safe room.\
Cameron was quiet through most of it. He was present, attentive and still distracted about something he was not opening up to me about.
When Dante finally stood to leave, he paused at the door and looked back at me.
“Get better,” he said. “And then think about whether you want to pick up a racket again. I’m not saying compete, but I do want us to have our battle on the court soon..”
I thought about what I’d told my mother, in the early days of treatment. The immediacy of it, the certainty.
*Tennis. I want to get back on a court.*
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
He nodded once, and left, and the door swung closed quietly behind him.
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