Filed to story: Sedona Preston and Logan Hayes Book PDF Free
In his small palm was Sedona’s wedding ring.
The diamond caught the lamplight, throwing little rainbows on the ceilings. It must have rolled under the bed after she’d left it on the nightstand, tumbled into the dust and the darkness where it had sat for over a week while I’d been going to galas and convincing myself she’d come back.
“Is this Mom’s ring?” Nick asked. “The one she always wears?”
“Yes.” My voice came out rougher than I intended.
“Why is it under the bed? Doesn’t she need it?”
I stared at the ring in my son’s hand and felt something shift deep in my chest, as the pieces were slowly coming together.
She’d left her ring. She’d left Nick’s teeth. She’d disconnected her phone, filed the divorce papers, said goodbye to Brooke like she was never coming back. She’d looked like paper at the hospital, pale and thin and barely able to stand without Cameron’s support.
Brooke was right, something was very wrong.
“Nick, can I have that?”
Logan’s POV
He handed it over without hesitation, watching me with those serious dark eyes that he’d inherited from Sedona, as he was waiting for me to give him an answer. An answer that I had no idea what to say to.
I held the ring in my palm, feeling the weight of it, a ring that I have never seen Sedona take off because she was too happy to be called my wife.
“Dad? Is Mom coming back?”
I had no answer for him. For the first time since this nightmare began, I had absolutely no idea what to tell my son.
I couldn’t sleep that night. lay in bed staring at the ceiling, turning the wedding ring over and over in my fingers, grandmother’s words still circling through my mind on an endless loop. *Something’s very wrong. That girl loved that boy more than anything. She wouldn’t walk away unless she believed she had no other choice.*
At 3 AM, I gave up on sleep entirely and went to my home office, where I sat down at my computer and opened Sedona’s financial records. She’d had access to our joint account for three years, though she’d rarely used it for anything beyond household expenses. I pulled up the transaction history, scanning backward through the entries.
There it was. Three weeks ago-a charge from Chicago General Hospital. The same day she’d called me multiple times from Disneyland. A significant amount, which was unusual for a mere pain reliever medicine, if she had bought it. No, this particular transaction was consistent with something along the lines of diagnostic testing or specialist consultation.
I hadn’t even noticed it in the account. Hadn’t thought to look. stared at the entry for a long time, then closed the laptop and sat in the dark.
In the morning, I told Mrs. Peterson I had an errand to run and asked her to take Nick to school. Then I drove to Chicago General Hospital, parked in the lot, and sat in my car for ten minutes talking myself into walking through those doors.
The emergency department was quiet at that hour, the night shift was finally winding down as I saw the night staffs, signing out, preparing to head home while the day shift was coming in, ready to sign in and work.
I approached the desk and explained to the intake administrator that I was looking for records related to my wife’s visit several weeks ago.
“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t disclose patient information to – “
“She’s my wife. I’m concerned about her whereabouts. She’s disappeared and I think she may have received some kind of diagnosis here that-” My voice broke slightly on the last word. “Please. I’m her husband: I just need to know if she’s okay.”
The administrator looked at me with professional sympathy and explained, again, about HIPAA regulations and patient privacy. thanked her mechanically and moved to a waiting area, trying to think of another approach.
I sat there for almost twenty minutes before a.nurse approached me-middle-aged, kind-faced, the kind of woman who’d probably been doing this job long enough to develop her own personal protocol for situations the rulebook didn’t quite cover.
“Excuse me,” she said quietly, sitting in the chair beside mine. “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with the front desk. Are you asking about Sedona Hayes?”
My head snapped up. “Yes. Do you know her? Did you see her?”
The nurse studied me for a moment, assessing. Whatever she saw in my face must have satisfied some internal test, because she sighed and said, “I was here the day she came in. I was her attending nurse for part of her time here.”
“Is she okay? What’s wrong with her?”
“Sir, I can’t officially disclose-“
“Please.” The word came out raw, stripped of everything. “Please. I’m her husband. She’s gone, she’s not answering her phone, she disappeared and I don’t-I don’t know where she is or if she’s-” I had to stop. Had to breathe. “I’m scared. I’m genuinely scared. Please.”
The nurse looked at me for a long moment, conflict visible on her face. Then she said, very quietly, “She was diagnosed with advanced gastric cancer. Stage three. The oncologist she saw estimated she had approximately three months without treatment. Perhaps a year with aggressive intervention.”
The words arrived one at a time, time,each tearing into my chest like a gun shot to the heart as I forgot how to breathe, like I had been thrown under still water. Gastric cancer. Stage three. Three months.
“When?” I heard myself ask. “When was this?”
She checked her notes. Told me the date.
The same day I was at Disneyland. The same day she’d called me four times and I’d sent the calls to voicemail, told her it was none of her business, told her to stop being selfish. The same day she’d called Katherine and Nick had told her she was annoying, that she was faking.
She wasn’t faking.
She’d been calling me from a hospital waiting room. She’d been waiting alone for a diagnosis that was going to tell her she was dying, and she’d called me-called me, of all people-because I was her husband, because she needed someone, because she was frightened and sick and alone.
And I had hung up on her.
“Sir? Are you alright?”
I was not alright. I was very far from alright. The hospital’s waiting room was tilting slightly, the fluorescent lights too bright, the chair beneath me suddenly insubstantial.
“Did she-“My voice failed. I cleared my throat, tried again. “Was there anyone with her? When she got the diagnosis?”
The nurse shook her head slowly. “She was alone.”
She had been alone. I thanked the nurse somehow, gathered my limbs into something resembling a functional body, and walked out of the hospital. I made it to my car. I sat down in the driver’s seat and closed the door and sat there in the parking lot of Chicago General Hospital, and I did something I hadn’t done since I was eleven years old and my father had told me that his own father was gone and wasn’t coming back.
I cried. I broke down and sobbed like a man who had just lost everything in his life and had no idea how to get it back.
Logan’s POV
All those weeks, that passed with me ignoring or rescheduling anything that had to do with Sedona because I was so caught up trying to relive the life that I had fantasized about with Catherine.
All those dismissals that I had given her, deciding her complaints were not important enough, all those hanged-up calls, all those moments I’d looked at her and seen her arguing about Catherine being more present in Nick’s life than she was and I had told her she was overreacting, she had been dying.
