I Was His Wife, Then His Widow, Then No One's But My Own novel Chapter 148

Bonnie didn't want to make Nora sad. She stared at the floor, biting her lip for a long moment before finally mumbling, "Okay."

The assistant gently took her hand to lead her out. At the door, Bonnie threw one last longing look at Nora before reluctantly following the man into the hallway.

The suite door clicked shut. The room descended into absolute silence, save for the steady, rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor.

Xander pulled a chair up to the bedside, his sharp, predatory gaze fixated on Nora's pale face.

He suddenly found he couldn't read the woman in front of him. Having navigated the brutal, cutthroat corporate world for years, he had seen the darkest sides of human greed. He had stopped believing in genuine kindness a long time ago.

Everyone who approached him wanted something, and those who approached Bonnie wanted even more. He had applied that exact logic to Nora time and time again, always arriving at the same cynical conclusion.

But today, Nora had completely shattered his assumptions.

There was actually someone willing to use her own body as a human shield for a child with zero blood relation to her. In the split second before that knife dropped, she hadn't hesitated.

Xander had seen it perfectly from the doorway. Her body had moved faster than her brain.

He took off his glasses, set them on the nightstand, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

A whole night of tension and adrenaline finally crashed down on him as a suffocating wave of exhaustion. He couldn't even remember the last time he had kept vigil by someone's bedside like this.

Just as he leaned back and closed his eyes, his phone buzzed.

It was his assistant, his tone strictly professional. "Mr. Harrison, the lab results for the watch you submitted just came back. It's completely clean."

The nanny tried to coax her to sleep, but Bonnie shook her head, insisting she needed to draw something for Nora. She knew it would make her smile when she woke up.

She drew a woman in a dress holding hands with a little girl in pigtails. At the very top, in wobbly handwriting, she wrote, "Nora is the bravest person in the world."

Only after carefully folding the paper and tucking it under her pillow did she finally curl under her covers and close her eyes.

The minute she opened her eyes the next morning, Bonnie demanded to go see Nora. Defeated, the nanny called the school to excuse her absence and took her straight to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Nora slowly fluttered her eyes open. Brilliant morning sunlight spilled through the window, and she instinctively raised her hand to block the glare.

A deep, cool voice sounded right beside her. "You're awake?"