Chapter 75
Looking For Solutions
Looking For Solutions
+25 Pointe
I would like to clarify a few things, Sedona and Logan have been married for almost 7 years, not 6. Nick is 6 years old, there are some typo errors and i haven’t had time to reread and edit, so
please be patient with me, from here now, it will be consistent. Thanks
Chapter 70: Looking For Solutions.
CATHERINE
“It will keep failing,” Alina said, without cruelty, just blantantly stating the facts that i clearly did not
want to hear from her.
“He’s six years old and he’s been built by someone else and you’re not willing to do what would
actually change that to make him depend on you instead by changing what he is used to, to something better. So yes, give him another chance if it helps you feel you tried your best with him. But start researching schools now. Have the information ready when you need it p>
I exhaled. “My season starts in eight weeks p>
“I know p>
“I’m supposed to be back for training in six. My shoulder p>
“Your shoulder is healed,” she said, and the tone shifted slightly-not hard, but exact. “I spoke with your physio last week, Catherine. She said you’re at ninety-two percent capacity and improving. You’ve been cleared for full practice for three weeks p>
I said nothing.
“You’re stalling,” Alina said cutting through the excuses.
“I understand why. But you cannot hold a professional tennis career in suspension indefinitely while
you wait for a billionaire to fall in love with you on a timeline that suits you. The season will not
wait p>
“I’m not asking the season to wait. I’m asking for six more weeks p>
“To accomplish what, specifically? What does six weeks get you that three months hasn’t p>
I pressed my fingers against my eyes. What would the six weeks extra get me.
I needed Logan to stop looking backward, searching for a woman who can be long dead by now, long enough to look at what was in front of him. I needed Nick to stop being a daily monument to Sedona’s absence and move on with his life and become, if not an ally, at least neutral with the fact that his father deserves happiness and i was capable of giving Logan that happiness.
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Looking For Solutions
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I needed the guilt in Logan’s eyes when he looked at me to shift into something else, the way he’
looked at me, when sedona was still a background invisible character.
Six weeks. Was that enough for me to accomplish all this?
“According to him, Sedona is dying. If he finds her p>
“If he finds her and she’s dying, it’s over,” Alina said flatly. “You understand that. If he finds her and she has maybe two months left and a cancer diagnosis, Logan Hayes is going to spend every one of those months trying to repair what he broke. You become irrelevant to him, he will abandon
you p>
“I know p>
“Then stop him from finding her.” Said simply, like it was obvious.
“I can’t stop a private investigator who p>
“I didn’t say stop the investigator. I said stop him. Logan. Men who are looking for something stop looking when they believe they’ve found it, or when they believe the search is pointless. If he’s convinced, that forgetting about her is the right choice…
“He’s not going to believe that. He knows about the cancer p>
“He knows what a nurse told him in a hospital waiting room. He doesn’t have verification. He doesn’t have certainty.” A pause.
“And a man looking for redemption can be led to find other ways to achieve it. Better ways. Ways that are right here. Ways that involve you p>
I sat with that, not sqaying anythinfg yet, just processing it.
The whiskey was still where I’d left it, untouched. I looked at it.
What Alina was saying was reasonable. Strategic.
I’d wanted Logan for a long time. Before the injury, before the return to Chicago, before the
well-timed coincidental run-in at the charity event that had been neither well-timed nor
coincidental.
I’d wanted him since the year I’d left him to pursue a career that turned out to have an expiration date built into it, since the year I’d chosen ambition over something that had actually been good, and spent the following decade occasionally wondering if the choice had been right.
Coming back had felt like correcting a mistake that teenage me had made, while searching for something i thought waited for me out there. But being back here, in his life, felt like returning to something that should have been mine.
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Points I hadn’t counted on Sedona. Or rather, I’d counted on her incorrectly, had expected her to fade
quietly in the background after noticing how sherry and Logan treated her.
She hadn’t faded. She was consistent for a long time and then she’d removed herself entirely, and
ironically, removing herself from the equation made everything tilt in her favour.
*I want Mommy. Why did Mommy leave? Doesn’t she love me anymore p>
I’d heard that too, standing in the hallway. Nick’s voice, asking the question that I did not know
how to explain without him seeing me as the bad guy.
I hadn’t wanted that. Let me be clear on that. I hadn’t wanted a child grieving his mother. I’d wanted the mother to simply be less present. I’d wanted her to be replaceable.
She wasn’t replaceable.
But Nick was six, and six-year-olds grew and changed and adapted, and the period of acute grief
for a mother who had left would not last forever.
The boy he was now, waiting by the door with his dark eyes and his careful polite rejection of my soup-that boy was a phase. He would grow, he would age more, what hurt him now would fade with time, if I stayed, if I secured my position, before Logan guilt would triumph over everything
else.
“I’ll give Nick one more real attempt,” I said.
“Something he actually wants. Not a meal he didn’t ask for. Something personal-find what he’s interested in, find a way in through that p>
“And if it doesn’t work p>
“Then we discuss the school option p>
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