Chapter 141
Chapter 140: Catherine’s Performance
Catherine POV
Eleven days of voicemail.
I knew the specific sound of Logan’s voicemail by now because I had gotten used to it, playing it a minimum of five times a day, eleven days straight without fail.
I can still hear the pause before it connected, the tone of his recorded voice, the way it said *you’ve reached Logan Hayes* with the professional tone he used for everything that might be listened to by someone who might try to reach out through him but couldn’t get to him. I never believed that I would fall under this category.
I’d been listening to it for eleven days.
I set the phone face-down on the kitchen counter and looked at the homework spread across the table in front of Nick, which was a second-grade worksheet on addition that he was solving with the attention. He’d had his head down for six minutes, working through the problems with the pencil held exactly the way I’d shown him two weeks ago, the way Sedona had forgotten to correct which means that I was doing something right and Sedona wasn’t as perfect as she made herself to be.
“Seven plus eight,” he said, to himself.
“What do you think?” I said.
He frowned at the paper. “Fifteen,” he said. Not a question exactly, but not quite a statement either-the tone of someone checking how the answer sounded before committing to it.
“Check it,” I said.
He counted on his fingers, which he did when he was uncertain and which he tried not to let me see him doing, curling them against the table edge so the movement was small.
“Fifteen,” he said again. More certain this time around rather than guessing it.
“Write it down,” I said.
He wrote it down carefully with the steadiness of a child who’d been told his handwriting mattered and had taken that seriously.
The seven was good. The eight still needed work-he closed the loop too early, which made it look like a six sometimes, which I’d mentioned once and would mention again when the moment was right.
Not now. He was doing well now and the rhythm of doing well was worth protecting.
This was the thing about Nick that Logan had never adequately communicated to me before now.
The specific way that Nick attacked a subject or the way he threw himself into doing something, which was accurate but insufficient.
Catherine & Performance
Claim
He was also very sensitive in the way of someone who received information completely, who processed Tt thoroughly, who remembered everything and cross-referenced it against future information without appearing to do so.
He was six years old and he was always checking his work.
I’d understood, in the first two weeks, that the approach of treating him as a child who could be managed through carefree techniques was going to fail. He had grown from the trips and the unnecessary things I had let him get away with just to make myself look more better than his mum in his eyes.
I had foolishly assumed that sticking to that would be enough to win him over but it seemed like I was
wrong.
He wasn’t that child. He was the child of a woman who’d spent three years making sure he understood his own body’s rules, who’d turned his medical protocols into games that he’d memorized so completely he could recite them unprompted, who also liked talking about actual adult things and refusing to hide them and sometimes understood a lot more than I had given him credit because of his age.
He’d been built to pay attention.
Which meant he’d noticed everything I’d done in the first half before Sedona vanished from his life and I’d had to recalibrate.
My phone lit up on the counter.
It was not Logan but was actually from the charity organization, about next month’s luncheon.
I silenced it and turned it back over and let it be what it was.
Nick looked at my phone, then at me, with the checking quality, his eyes proving as he chewed on his lips before asking,
“Is that Dad?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s someone from work p>
He returned to his worksheet. Added nine plus four with the finger-counting he didn’t want me to see, wrote thirteen with the careful letter quality.
Logan’s phone going to voicemail for eleven days.
He was in Seattle. I knew this because I’d called someone-not someone who did jobs for me that I wanted silencing and he had spied on Logan, but through a channel that was hidden to most people especially men like Logan too-and confirmed that Logan’s rental car was still in a Seattle parking structure and that he’d been extending a motel reservation in increments that suggested someone who’d planned to leave and kept not leaving.
He’d gone to find Sedona and hadn’t come back.
I thought about what that meant with the insistence and more focused concentration to the things that I had found concerning.
Logan in Seattle meant Logan in proximity to Sedona, which was information I’d been managing against for months. Every day he was there was a day the proximity could produce something I hadn’t accounted
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< Catherine’s Performance
Claim
for. The day that his love for me might be getting smaller and being transferred to someone who doesn’t deserve it all because she had run away while I had stepped up and still hasn’t been appreciated.
I’d been careful.
The Sedona phone call-I’d replayed that conversation more times than I’d like to admit, checking the architecture of it, identifying everything that was covered in that conversation and where it might have let in light.
The ‘he barely mentions’ that I’d caught before it finished. The warm delivery of things that were designed to land a specific way. Something that seemed kind but pointed aimed to hurt her feelings but not too much for Sedona to see through it.
I thought she’d received it. I thought the call had done what I’d needed it to do and she would have realized that there was no need for her here, no space and she had been erased completely.
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Florence
A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.