Chapter 73
Catherine Is Furious
Chapter 68: Catherine is Furious
CATHERINE
The elevator doors closed slowly with a hiss, before it started going down and I let my face drop
the cheerful facade that it had been displaying all night long.
Not dramatically-I wasn’t alone yet, there was a nurse at the station across the lobby who might have been watching me, well visitors in general, and she might have clocked me coming out of the pediatric wing-so I kept it contained, trying not to make it obvious so i would be one of those faces, not too special to be remembered.
But i allowed myself to have a release. Just a small release. The kind of exhaustion that came with pretending to be someone you are no for two hours, regardless of my actual feelings to it.
I crossed the lobby at the same measured pace I’d used upstairs, not in a hurry, composed and taking my time. i had the face of a woman who had silently shown up to offer support and was leaving quietly without issues.
I made it to the car.
I sat in the driver’s seat of my Range Rover, closed the door, and pressed the heels of both hands
against my eyes.
Nick.
I could still see his face when he’d looked at the soup. That particular look-politely blank, deliberately withholding, the look of a six-year-old who had decided he didn’t want what was being offered and had no intention of pretending otherwise. Not rude. He’d been careful not to be rude, which was somehow more infuriating, because rudeness I could have used and make it all about
me, placing myself as the victim.
Rudeness would have given Logan something to correct about Nick who would realize that his dad was on my side. Rudeness would have created distance between father and son that I could
have gently, carefully helped to bridge.
Instead he’d been polite. Correct. Exactly well-mannered enough that there was nothing for Logan
to object to, while making it absolutely clear that he wanted nothing from me.
I just don’t want soup from her p>
I had heard it, what he said after i hd supposedly gotten to get him the crackers.
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I’d been watching from the hallway, hidden from plain view so i could hear what they were going to talk about while the nurse found the crackers.
was standing just outside the door where Nick couldn’t see me, listening to my son-who-wasn’t-yet explain to his father that he didn’t want my soup. That he wanted soup from someone else. Astronaut soup. Little stars.
I started the car.
The drive from the hospital to my apartment took twenty-two minutes at this hour, and I used all of
them to think. Not to feel, feeling things were counterproductive and i had done a lot of them this
past week, while waiting for the green light from logan.
To map the situation clearly, the way I’d always done. Break it down into components. Assess each
one. Identify what was working and what wasn’t.
What wasn’t working was the list I started with.
Three months. I had been back in Chicago for three months, and the timeline I’d set for myself
when I’d decided to come back was not going to work out from what i am seeing p>
Logan was more distracted than I’d expected, more guilty than I’d anticipated, he had become more obsessive and more preoccupied with a woman who had, removed herself from the
equation.
That had been the point. Sedona leaving was supposed to simplify things.
It was supposed to clear the field, shift the dynamic that was already on route, create space in Logan’s life for something that actually fit. For someone he actually wanted, before conveneince and purity had been what made Sedona marry someone like him.
She was gone. She had taken her one suitcase and her signed divorce papers and her disconnected phone and she had left, exactly as I’d hoped-maybe not exactly as I’d planned, some elements had been more extreme than the usual gentle ones. Hin sorry about that.than I’d
intended, but the outcome was what mattered and the outcome was that she was gone.
And yet she was everywhere.
Her labels in Logan’s suits, which I’d seen him touch sometimes absently, his fingers tracing it without knowing he was doing it.
Her systems in the house was still running without her-Mrs. Peterson was maintaining the specific products, the fragrance-free detergent, the lavender soap, and then they’d run out and Mrs. Peterson had replaced them with the wrong things and Nick had ended up in a hospital
because the particular armor Sedona had built for him needed specific materials that no one else
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Her recipes, apparently, with their little star pasta and their emotional significance to a child who’d
never thought to ask why.
She had been so thorough and yet so invincible that I’d dismissed as excessively when Logan complained about her, as evidence of her controlling tendencies, her inability to let Nick develop naturally like other peers his age, always limiting what he could and could not have.
I’d listened to those complaints and told Logan he was right to find it suffocating, had helped him see her duties to this family was seen as a problem rather than a system.
I’d underestimated what removing the system would expose.
I pulled into my building’s parking garage and sat in the space for a moment before going up.
*You can’t make a six-year-old love you.* There was no two ways about it.
I had known that, in theory. I’d been good with children before, friends kids, and kids from junior programs, where they had trained under me as a mentor.
What I hadn’t accounted for was how thoroughly Sedona had colonized his idea of what a mother was. Her soup that no one could replace.
He didn’t want my soup because it wasn’t her soup.
He’d pushed the container to the edge of the table-not violently, not rudely, just a careful incremental movement until it was as far from him as it could be without falling-and then he’d
asked for crackers.
*Six years old*, I reminded myself. *Children change. Children adapt. Given time and consistency and the absence of a competing attachment, children attach to what’s available p>
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