Filed to story: Sedona Preston and Logan Hayes Book PDF Free
Her desperation to reach out to me, to get me to hear her out and I had shunned everything.
She’d been trying to tell me something was very wrong.
And I hadn’t listened. I’d been so busy being irritated by her, so certain that her emotions were inconvenient and her needs were unreasonable, so convinced that I was the one who was suffering a lot in this marriage that I never even wondered if she was okay.
The divorce papers were not her trying to make a point. She was dying and she was setting me free, and she hadn’t even told me why because she’d known, she known that I would think she was trying to manipulate me, or i wouldn’t care.
When had that become true? When had I become someone whose wife couldn’t tell him she was dying because she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her?
I thought about every phone call I’d ignored. Every text I’d dismissed. Every time she’d come to me with something and I’d shut it down, told her she was overreacting, and went back to be with Catherine, the woman I believed I was in love with.
I thought about Marcus at the gala. *Your wife is devoted to you. Do you know that?*
I hadn’t noticed that at all.
I thought about the labels in my suits, each one carefully stitched in her handwriting. *You’ve got this. You’re going to be amazing today.*
She’d written that for me. She’d sewn that into my clothing with her own hands, and I had wore it to every business meeting, not knowing she had been rooting for me, all this while.
I thought about Nick’s baby teeth, left behind in their box. Not forgotten, Sedona doesn’t forget anything. She’d left them deliberately for me to find because she wanted out. Because she was going home to die, and she didn’t want to take evidence of a child who’d told her he hated her to her deathbed.
My son had told his dying mother that he hated her. And I had told her she was being selfish.
I sat in that parking lot for a very long time. Feeling very numb, unable to do anything, I couldn’t bring myself to even head to the company. I sat still and I waited for other cars to come and go, for a woman to knock on my window and ask if I needed help because I’d been there so long she was worried. I waved her off, thanked her, tried to pull myself together.
Stage three gastric cancer. Three months without treatment. The same day I was at Disneyland. She’d been alone
My phone kept buzzing Work calls I couldn’t answer. A text from Catherine asking if I was alright, she hadn’t heard from me all day. A message from my assistant about a meeting I’d missed. Nick’s school, reminding me about an art show on Friday that I’d promised to attend.
I looked at all of it and felt nothing. Absolute zero.
Where was she? That was the only question that mattered now. Not the divorce papers, not the ring under the bed, not the weeks of silence and fury and wounded pride. Where was Sedona? Was she in treatment? Was she getting care? Was she somewhere alone and sick and- Cameron.
The tall man at the hospital. She’d introduced him by name. She’d said they’d been together for days and nights, said it to wound me, and I’d taken the wound and run with it, assumed the worst, let jealousy eclipse everything else.
I had to find her. Whatever it took, however many bridges I’d burned, however many times she’d told me she, was done-I had to find her.
Because the alternative was that somewhere out there, my wife was dying alone. And she’d made peace with that. She had accepted that, but not me.
I was going to find one, one way or the other. I wont rest until I bring her home.
I drove until I found myself parked outside the bookstore she’d loved, a place she had divorced while pregnant with Nick and had returned to, once a month up till now to read in peace. I went inside and showed her photo to the man behind the counter, he seemed like the kind that recognized his steady and consistent customers.
“Oh, Sedona!” His face fell. “Is she alright? She came in weeks ago to return some books she’d borrowed. She said she was moving away. We were sad to see her go. She’d been coming in for years.”
Moving away. That word, I clungto it tightly, she wasn’t staying with someone but leaving. Leaving to where?
“Did she say where?”
He shook his head apologetically. “Just that she was going home.
I thanked him and left, as I stepped out into the cold street. He may have not known where she was but he told me much, Sedona had gone home. She had family somewhere. She’d gone home to them.
My phone buzzed. Catherine, calling this time.
I stared at the name on the screen for a long moment.i wanted to let it ring, not eager in the mood for a conversation but then I changed my mind.
I answered.
“Logan, I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Are you alright? You missed your two o’clock-“
“She has cancer,” I said. “Sedona has cancer, Stage three. She was diagnosed the day we were at Disneyland.”
Logan’s POV
Catherine did not say anything, granted there was no accurate answer to what I just told her, but a part of me wanted her to know, a small petty part of me, that knew she knew I put her above my wife all the damn fucking time.
“The day she called me,” I continued, my voice flat, measured, because if I let any emotion into it I was going to shatter and I wasn’t ready to cross that bridge yet. After all, I was in full autonomy when I was doing it, so pinning it on her was not reasonable.
“The day I told her it was none of her business and hung up. She was calling me from a hospital waiting room. She was about to get the worst news of her life and she called me, and I told her she was being selfish and she shouldn’t bother me, because I was with you and you were more important.”
“Logan-” Catherine’s voice was very quiet. “I didn’t know-“
“Neither did I. That’s the problem. I didn’t know because I didn’t ask her questions, I just concluded. I didn’t ask because I didn’t look. And I didn’t look because I was too busy being angry at her for existing inconveniently in my life.” I laughed, and it came out wrong, I sounded bitter and broken as I suppressed the tears, as I continued speaking.
“She signed divorce papers and disconnected her phone and disappeared. At first I was willing to wait her out, thinking she was trying to make me panic, but that was before I found out about the cancer and realized that I had been delusional all this while, She’s dying somewhere and she doesn’t want me to find her because she knows I’ll make it worse.”
“You don’t know that-“
“She’s right, Catherine.” The name felt strange in my mouth, as it suddenly felt heavy with a weight that I hadn’t carried before. “She’s absolutely right. Everything I’ve done since you came back to Chicago- everything I’ve said, every dismissal, every time I told her she was overreacting-I was making it worse. I was so convinced she was jealous and manipulative and unreasonable that I never once considered whether she had a reason. Whether there was something real underneath all of it.”
“Logan, I-” A pause. “I’m sorry. If I played any part in-“
“I need to find her.” I cut her off, not unkindly but firmly. “That’s all I can think about right now. I need to find her.”
“How? If she’s disconnected her phone, if she’s left Chicago-“
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to figure it out. But when she comes back home, I will make her my priority and not you,” I stood up straighter, something resolving in me even through the grief, some vestigial competence reasserting itself. “I have to. She’s my wife. She’s Nick’s mother. Whatever else I’ve gotten wrong in the past year, I can’t get this wrong too.”
After I hung up, I stood on the sidewalk outside Sedona’s bookstore for a moment longer, looking up at the gray Chicago sky.
I’d spent three years with a woman and learned almost nothing about her. Her past. Her family. Her real name, maybe because if she’d hidden a family from me, what else had she hidden? Who was she, really, beyond what she’d let me see?
I had divorce papers signed by Sedona Claire Hayes. A maiden name she’d never told me. I never even knew her middle name.
