Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 45

Chapter 43: Apologies Are Made

Sedona’s POV

Molly had fallen completely asleep against my chest, her breathing soft and even, her hand still clutching on tight to the fabric of my hospital gown.

I adjusted my hold on her a bit, making sure she was comfortable, and yet, careful enough not to wake her, feeling the same way I felt when I was carrying Nick, the joy that came with it.

Rachel settled more comfortably in her chair, holding her coffee cup in both hands, and exchanged a look with Enzo that contained the ‘kind of silent communication that happens between people who had been together long enough to develop their own kind of silent language

“So,” Rachel said, her voice soft in deference to the sleeping baby. “I suppose you’re wondering how we ended up here.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” I admitted, curious about it. It was something that I had never expected, and yet it worked out.

“Last I knew, you were my maid of honor for my wedding and Enzo was my reluctant fiancé, and neither of you had ever shown the slightest interest in each other beyond basic courtesy and rare conversations. I was usually the running man between you both.”

“That’s not entirely accurate,” Enzo said, with the faint smile he’d always had when he was about to say something he’d been thinking about for a while.

“I’d noticed Rachel a lot. I just avoided her and focused on you because I feared that acknowledging it would be some kind of a betrayal. I’d simply convinced myself that noticing her was inappropriate given that I was engaged to her best friend.”

Rachel made a sound that might have been a laugh or a snort as she looked amused at the whole thing.

“He’d noticed me. That’s what he said, about a year after you disappeared, when we were both quite drunk at the Riverside Tavern because it was the anniversary of the wedding that never happened and we’d both decided that drowning our feelings we had towards each other was an acceptable response to the date.”

“We were very drunk,” Enzo confirmed, continuing from where she stopped, picking up the flow of the conversation.

“Embarrassingly so. The bartender cut us off around eleven pm and called Rachel’s mother to collect us, which was humiliating for multiple reasons.”

“My mother,” Rachel said, “took one look at us, sitting in that corner booth being subdued together, and said something that I’ve never forgotten.

I hadn’t known. The information sat heavy in my stomach. “No.”

“Your father hired three different firms over the first two years. They found nothing. It was like you’d simply ceased to exist.” Rachel’s voice was steady but I could hear the old hurt underneath it.

“Cameron was the worst about it. He blamed himself for not seeing how desperate you were, how reluctant you were about the wedding, he blamed himself for not doing more to stop the wedding before it got to the point where you felt running was your only option. He drank a lot during that time, he was always depressed, not working, locked in his room, he kept shouting at everyone, hell he shouted at me once when I came to pick him up from another bar he found himself in.”

Guilt, familiar and thorough, moved through me. “I didn’t know he felt that way, or that he went through all of that, he didn’t mention anything to me. I assumed that he was just sad but still functional.”

“He doesn’t talk about it much. But I saw it, in those first few months. He was…” She paused, searching for the right word. “Driven. Obsessed with finding you. Your parents eventually convinced him to stop, told him that you’d clearly wanted to leave and that we had to respect that, even if it hurt. And that we should pray that you were doing alright and you knew that you were always welcomed back if you decided to return home.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, for what felt like the thousandth time since returning to Seattle. “I’m sorry I put all of you through that.”

“You’ve apologized enough,” Enzo said gently, shaking his head as he added. “What Rachel is trying to tell you, in her roundabout way, is that we bonded over our worry for you. And somewhere in all those conversations about where you might be and whether you were safe, we discovered that we actually enjoyed talking to each other and spending time with each other. And we also liked doing things that had nothing to do with you.”