Chapter 142
Chapter 141: Slowly Replacing Sedona
Catherine POV
Clam
But Sedona was not straightforward, which was something I’d underestimated when I’d come back to Chicago. I’d expected her to be the woman Logan had described-anxious, controlling, difficult, unbearing to live with. He had sought comfort from me, saying things that wasn’t good about her, telling me that it was just me that he needed to feel complete. The woman who made scenes about Catherine’s presence, who was jealous and unreasonable, who needed managing, the exact kind of woman she had been during my early returns into Logan and Nick’s life, acting innocent while they complained of the nagging mess that they had at home.
She hadn’t been that woman. Or rather, she’d been something more than that woman, who finally saw that doing all that was beneath her, underneath the situation Logan had created around her, and by the time I’d understood the difference between someone who kept holding onto something out of sentiment and someone who had let everything to crash burning all past bridges, it had already been relevant.
The party. She’d gotten a party.
I knew about the party because Sherry knew about the party-Sherry’s information network was one of the effective things that Sherry had going for her. After getting the truth out of Logan who kept his mum updated with what he knew, it was easy to get it out from Sherry too who called me at the nearest free moment and told me everything. She has been rooting for me and Logan. She wants Logan to come back to his senses and pick me, but she also knew that telling Logan this to his face wasn’t going to produce anything so she kept it to herself and helped the little she could by allowing me to come and spend time with Nick, if I could get Nick on my side, Logan would have no reason to look for her anymore.
‘Forty-three people, Sherry had said. ‘In her parents house. Cameron organized it. They’ve all been there the whole time, Jennifer and Parker-her parents, Catherine, her parents were there the whole time she
was in treatment.
I’d received that information and processed it and said the right things to Sherry which meant putting on an act and saying the nice things that validated her feelings, and now Sedona deserves this. It also told me things that I was angry about. Sedona must be on the road of recovery which means that waiting for death to take her away from Logan would no longer be a viable option and I had to get/fid of her myself.
Sedona had parents. Sedona had a brother, and parents, and forty-three people, and a tennis player who’d been visiting her in hospital every day for six weeks.
She hadn’t been an orphan.
She’d built an entire identity around having no one, and Logan had accepted it because Logan was someone who accepted things that did not bring complications to him later on.
She’d been smarter than I’d given her credit for.
The homework was going well. Nick was on the last row, the column addition, which was where it got harder for most second graders but which he’d been doing reasonably since I’d shown him the carrying technique last week. He frowned at the question and then took his time to implement what I had shown him weeks ago.
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“Good,” I said, when he wrote the answer. Clam He looked at me with the checking quality. Looked at the answer. “Is it right? Rather than telling him the answer, and making him think it came easily, I wanted him to learn it himself so in school he can do it easily without waiting for someone to tell him. But also because Nick was someone who distrusted me and had stopped taking my words blindly to heart after Sedona left and he had told me to get out of his hospital room in much kid-friendly tone. “Check it,” I said. He checked it. The checking was the thing-he didn’t trust my confirmation, which was something that was good objectively but It made him harder to manage than a child who took confirmation at face value. But he was still a child who was easily persuaded if using the right connection and I had found it and used I thought about the lavender cream that I had recreated for Nick to be using, just like the one his mum used to make for him and nick had been nostalgic enough to accept it. I’d found the formula written in Sedona’s handwriting in the kitchen drawer, tucked between takeout menus and a birthday card that seemed to be one of old nick’s card that he made for his mum. The formula had been specific: specific oils, specific quantities, specific process notes in the margin about temperature and mixing time. I’d made it twice before I’d gotten it close enough to be useful. The first batch had been wrong and made nick shun it completely when I showed him. The second batch had been closer. Close enough that his skin hadn’t flared up at all since he started using it. He hadn’t said it was right. But he’d used it. So that was basically a yes it is the same cream my mum used to make for me but I won’t tell you that because you are the reasons she left and I still want her back. That was the work of what more than a month had done-the careful and the slow construction of something that could hold weight. Making meaningful memories with Nick as well trying to replace Sedona by redoing all the things she did for him. I was good at this. I’d always been good at this, at understanding what something required and providing it in the form that would be accepted, and this was all because of the help that I had since this whole thing started. Sherry had been the key. Comments LUCK DRAW > Vote 535 Florence A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.