Filed to story: Sedona Preston and Logan Hayes Book PDF Free
I left it all.
Let Katherine have it. If she was so desperate to be the catching eye candy hanging off Logan’s arms then she was free to do so. He might probably treat her better than he treated me, that was evident already, he can have her and let me go.
Besides she certainly wanted the part more than I ever had.
My hands trembled as I folded a simple cotton dress as my brain supplied the memory of how I had gotten it. This was the very first gown, that I had worn on my date with Logan, when I’d still believed in fairy tales.
I remembered how he’d looked at me that night, like I had hung the stars in his world, I liked how attentive he’d been to me, reminding me of things that I had said days ago, or how he’d listened to me talk about my dreams of maybe teaching tennis someday, of having a quiet, happy life, with the one I want, raising the family that I wanted, finding true love.
But now, I could see it for what it was. All lies. Or maybe not lies, exactly. Maybe he’d just been seeing Katherine’s face instead of mine, hearing what he wanted to hear instead of what I was actually saying. And pretending all along that I was the woman he actually wished me to be. That was probably how he got through with sleeping with me. The thought alone, made me want to throw up as bile rose in my throat bu I forced it down, taking deep breaths to calm myself down.
I moved to the dresser, pulling open drawers and sorting through their contents as I browsed through it, taking what was important and leaving the ones that can be thrown away. I was reaching for a stack of shirts when my hand brushed against something small and hard in the back of the drawer.
My heart stopped for a moment as I recognized what it was.
The small wooden box was exactly where I’d left it, hidden behind my winter sweaters. With shaking hands, I pulled it out and opened the lid.
Nick’s baby teeth.
Seven tiny white pearls, each one carefully wrapped in tissue paper with the date written on it in my handwriting. I’d saved them all, had planned to give them to Nick when he was older, maybe when he had children of his own. It was a foolish hope that I had, keeping evidences that his mum loved him.
I picked up the first tooth, dated two years ago. Nick had been so brave when it had fallen out, so excited to put it under his pillow for the tooth fairy. I’d stayed up until midnight to sneak into his room and replace it with a dollar bill and a note from the “tooth fairy” telling him how proud she was of his courage.
The memory felt like a knife to my chest.
Nick had been such a difficult baby. Born at thirty-two weeks, barely four pounds, his tiny body fighting for every breath in the NICU. I’d spent six weeks living in that hospital, sitting beside his incubator, talking to him, singing to him, willing him to live. That was the only time that Logan was present, all the time, we both wanted nick to survive. He was the glue holding us together.
And he had lived. My miracle baby.
But he’d been fragile. So fragile and the doctors had told me, that getting him past the infancy stage would require a lot of 24/7 care because he was allergic to a lot of things. Allergies to dairy, eggs, and nuts. Asthma that flared up with any change in weather or exposure to pollen. A compromised immune system that meant every cold turned into bronchitis, every scrape took weeks to heal, rather than days.
I’d been vigilant through it all, as I made sure I controlled his diet rigidly, kept him on a strict schedule, and I also went further to limit most of his fun activities to things that wouldn’t trigger his asthma or risk injury, not caring that my son didn’t like it and craved freedom, throwing tantrums to make a point, but I had stood firm through it all. Other mothers had thought I was overprotective, paranoid even. That it was normal for kids to have injuries, that keeping him coddled up, was asking for a ‘fairy’ son. That he would turn out liking dolls and pink things. I paid no heed to them because they had no ideas what my fears were, they hadn’t watched their child turn blue from an allergic reaction. They hadn’t rushed their baby to the ER three times in his first year of life. They hadn’t been told by doctors that one more serious infection could be fatal.
I’d kept Nick safe. I’d kept him alive. And he’d grown to hate me for it.
The memory of two weeks ago crashed over me as I recognized that day, I would never forget it as long as I breath-Nick’s pale, furious face as he’d screamed at me in the foyer. Katherine had taken him to Grant Park, had bought him ice cream even though she knew- SHE KNEW because I told her that he was lactose intolerant.
Nick had been sick all night, cramping and crying, and I’d stayed up with him, rubbing his back, giving him medication, cleaning up after him, promising him that the pain would pass soon enough and it will all be a thing of the past.
The next morning, Katherine had sent flowers with an apologetic note: “So sorry! I forgot about his allergy. He just looked so happy eating the ice cream!”
She’d forgotten. As if Nick’s health was some minor detail that could slip one’s mind.
But Nick hadn’t blamed Katherine. He’d told me I was being mean for being upset with her, that it was “just an accident,” that I was “making a big deal out of nothing.”
Then there’d been the garden party at the Wilson estate. Katherine had insisted Nick come along, had promised to watch him carefully. She’d let him run through the flower beds, not only was that disrespectful since it was being cared for by a professional gardener, the flower beds were also full of the exact types of pollen that triggered his asthma. He’d had an attack so severe I’d had to use his emergency inhaler twice and had nearly taken him to the hospital.
Katherine had cried, had apologized profusely, had said she’d “never forgive herself.”
But she’d done it again the following week. Another minor incident that she pretended it wasn’t a big deal. Soccer in the rain. Nick had come home soaked and shivering, and despite my immediate intervention, making sure that he had a very warm bath, and dressed him up in dry clothes, and made him take preventive medication-he’d spiked a fever of 102 degrees by morning.
And still, still, when his fever hadn’t fully broken after two days, Nick had begged to go to the zoo with Katherine and Logan. I’d said no. Absolutely not. He was still recovering, still weak, still at risk for his fever spiking again.
Nick had looked at me with such hatred.
“I hate you,” he’d screamed, his six-year-old face twisted with rage. “Katherine is right about you. You treat me like a sheep in a pen. You never let me have any fun. You’re the devil! I wish Katherine was my mom instead of you!”
I’d stood there, frozen, as he’d run to his room and slammed the door. Logan had been there, had witnessed the whole thing, and he’d simply shrugged.
“Maybe you are too strict with him, Sedona. He’s not made of glass. Let him be a kid.”
Let him be a kid. As if I was the villain in this story. As if I hadn’t spent six years of my life ensuring he survived to have a childhood at all.
Sedona’s POV
I shook my head, taking a deep breath as I exhaled. There was no use reminiscing about what used to be. I carefully wrapped the tooth back in its tissue paper and placed it in the box with the others. My hands hovered over it, wanting to take it, wanting to keep this piece of my son.
But what was the point? Nick didn’t want me. He’d made that abundantly clear. All these were just reminders of a relationship that had already died and should be left in the past.
I closed the box and put it back in the drawer, exactly where I’d found it.
Let Logan find them someday. Let him explain to Nick, when he was older, that his mother had saved every tooth, had cherished every milestone, had loved him enough to keep him alive even when it made her the villain of his story.
I turned away from the dresser, my vision blurring with tears I refused to shed. I was done crying over people who didn’t want me.
The last drawer I opened was the one in my nightstand. I reached in blindly, expecting to find just the usual items-hand lotion, tissues, the book I’d abandoned months ago, spare changes that I had thrown in there, and forgotten about.
Instead, my fingers closed around something cool and smooth.
I pulled it out and gasped.
The ruby necklace gleamed in my palm, its deep red stones catching the late afternoon light. It was beautiful and expensive. It was not just any necklace that LOgan had bought during our years of marriage as compensation for treating me as invincible. But this was different, although it was worth a fortune, it held more value to me because of who had given it to me.
Grandma Brooke.
Logan’s grandmother had been the only person in the Hayes family who’d ever truly acqepted me. as i was, secrets and all that. Not because I looked like Katherine, not because I’d given birth to an heir, and fulfilled my duties but because she’d actually seen me as a person.
I remembered the day she’d given me this necklace. It had been a week after my wedding, and she’d invited me to tea at her penthouse-just the two of us, without Logan or Sherry or anyone else.
“This belonged to my mother,” Grandma Brooke had said, fastening the necklace around my neck with her aged but steady hands. “And her mother before her. It’s meant for the wife of the Logan family heir.”
“But Sherry-” I’d started.
“Sherry is my daughter-in-law, and I love her, but she’s not the right person for this necklace. You are.” Grandma Brooke had turned me to face the mirror, her hands on my shoulders. “Do you know how I know?”
