Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 38

Chapter 36: Back Home in Seattle

Sedona’s POV

I’d forgotten what Seattle smelled like. It has been so long that I stepped in Sedona that everything now felt like nostalgia, bringing tears to my ears that I blinked back hard, to avoid it spilling down my face. I never thought I was going to see the place again before I died.

It was still the same familiar scent that I had grown up used to; Salt àir and cedar and the cool summer breeze that came accompanied by the smell of something being fried in the streets, this was the same particular combination that you only got in the Pacific Northwest, that you couldn’t replicate anywhere else. It hit me the moment the car door opened, even before I could see anything past the morning fog that saturated the whole town.

Cameron had hired a car from the airport, instead of calling the family driver. This car was a rental, that helped passengers go to their destinations.

This was a quiet, dark SUV with tinted windows and a driver who didn’t ask questions. He’d helped me into the backseat at O’Hare with the careful way someone did, when handling precious cargo, I do not know if Cameron informed him, before hand or my appearance was more than enough for him to know that I was very sick.

I didn’t dwell much on it, as I closed my eyes allowing the soothing movement of the car to lull me to sleep and and I’d fallen asleep somewhere over Montana and woken up with my cheek against the window and the Seattle skyline in the distance.

“We’re almost there,” Cameron said from beside me, his voice the same steady and comforting tone, that it had been for days, one of the familiar constant in this scary journey that I was navigating all blindly.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like myself,” I said. “Which is either a good sign or a terrible one.”

A ghost of a smile crossed his face as he shook his head at my dry witty humor..

“For what it’s worth, you look slightly more like yourself than you did this morning.”

I didn’t ask what I’d looked like this morning. I had an idea of what he meant because I’d caught my reflection in the hotel bathroom mirror before we left and had stopped looking after approximately two seconds.

The neighborhood came first, as I could see the familiar wide streets with their mature trees, fruits already ready for their plucking, some, fallen on the grounds where they stayed, the houses set back from the road behind generous lawns. All my life I’d lived here before I ran, and every corner was saturated with a childhood I’d been too young to appreciate and too proud to miss. Because missing it would need for me to accept and confess even to just myself that I had made a terrible mistake in the first place.

And then the house itself, at the end of the familiar cul-de-sac. Three stories, white with navy trim, the Japanese maple my father had planted the year I was born now enormous in the front garden, its autumn leaves red as rubies.

Two figures stood on the front step.

“None of that. None of that now. You’re here. That’s all that matters.”

My father reached us, and for a moment he just stood there, this tall, self-contained man who I’d always been slightly afraid of in the way of daughters who respect their fathers too much to disappoint them easily.

Parker Preston was someone who always wore a composed serious face- strong jaw, measured eyes, the face of someone who had learned long ago that showing vulnerability was a luxury executives couldn’t afford.

His face wasn’t composed now.

“Dad,” I managed.

He pulled me in with both arms, and I felt him shaking slightly, this mountain of a man, and something inside me that had been locked up for five years finally broke open completely.

“I’m sorry,” I said into his shoulder, into the familiar smell of his aftershave that hadn’t changed in thirty years. “I’m sorry for running. I’m sorry for not calling. I’m sorry for all of it-”