Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 39

Reunion With Her Parents

Chapter 37. Reunion With Her Parents

Sedona’s POV

I could feel his shoulders shaking as he bugged me tightly.

“No.” His voice was rough, filled with emotions that were present in his voice, that I hadn’t known was possible in my years of being his daughter.

“No, Sedona. You are not in the wrong here, we are. We are the one who made you feel that you were worth more to our business than in being our child, we were the reason why you decide to run away, risking everything out there. We’re sorry. We pushed too hard, we didn’t listen, we made you feel like you had no choice but to do what we had asked you, irrespective of your feelings towards it.”

He pulled back to look at me, and I saw with something like shock that his eyes were wet as he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand as I saw my mum do the same, giving me a watery smile, her hand reaching out to touch me again, like she was making sure that I wasn’t a mirage or a fever dream..

My father continued speaking, making me look at him as he added “No arranged marriage was worth losing you. Not any marriage, not any business arrangement, not anything. We should have seen that then. We should have known.”

“We both made mistakes,” my mother said, her arms still around me, the three of us standing in the front garden in the Seattle afternoon, our neighbors probably watching the show, eating popcorn from their windows.

“All of us. We all made mistakes and crossed lines that shouldn’t be crossed, hurting ourselves in the process. And we have time now to do better. We have time.”

Time. The word landed differently for me than it did for her. She meant it as abundance-we have all the time we need, we can take this slowly, we can rebuild. I heard it as scarcity. I heard the three months my Chicago doctor had given me. I heard the stage three that Cameron had told Dr. Mitchell about in the car on the phone while I pretended to be asleep.

But I nodded, and I leaned into my mother’s arms, and for the first time since I’d received a diagnosis in a sterile hospital room while my husband was riding a roller coaster with another woman and my son-

I thought of Nick.

I thought about him every day, in the margins of all other thoughts in the spaces between sleeping and waking when I had nothing to do but stare at the ceiling, counting the white tiles trying to stop myself from thinking about Nick.. But I could still see his face at the hospital, lit up for one unguarded mornent when he’d seen me. The way he’d reached for my hand before I’d pulled away from him. The hurt in his eyes that I’d put there deliberately because I’d told myself I didn’t have the resources left to absorb his ambivalence. But then I had seen Catherine with them and came to the bitter conclusion that he might have not even realized that I wasn’t home since Catherine had been with him occupying his days with fun. Him lifting up was nothing more than him just seeing a familiar place in a place he didn’t expect to see them, it was nothing more than that. The truth hurts but I held on tight to it, wondering if I was secretly a masochist.

I thought about whether I’d made the right choice. As a mum, the most important thing in her life was her child and in my situation a sickly child like Nick had been everything to me, what I had lived and sacrificed for. A part of me was torn wondering whether I was making the right choice, every day, by not fighting for him. If I should have taken him a long, just to have to die on him in the next three months.

Grandma Brooke’s voice in my memory: *Someday he’s going to look for you, and you won’t be there.*

But I was here. I was in Seattle, in my childhood bedroom, beginning treatment that might-might-give me more time. I was still here. There was still time.

I closed my eyes and let Seattle hold me, and I allowed myself the dangerous luxury of hope.