Filed to story: Sedona Preston and Logan Hayes Book PDF Free
I pulled out my phone and called my lawyer.
“I need you to find someone,” I said when he answered. “Her name is Sedona Claire Hayes. Or possibly Sedona Claire something else I’m not certain Hayes is her original surname. She’s approximately twenty-eight, grew up somewhere, possibly with someone, a boyfriend or a brother named Cameron. She was at Northwestern Memorial about ten days ago and Chicago General about three weeks ago.” I paused. “Find her. Whatever it costs, whatever you have to do. Find her.”
I hung up and stared at my reflection in the bookstore window. I looked like a stranger-pale, hollowed out, the expensive suit that Sedona had labeled and categorized and recommended somehow making me look smaller instead of larger.
You wore this on our first anniversary. You looked so handsome. Love, S.
I was going to find her. I was going to find her and I was going to look her in the eye and say every word I should have said months ago, years ago, the day she first walked into my life and I saw only a resemblance instead of a person.
And then I was going to spend every single day she had left making it mean something. If she’d let me. If it wasn’t already too late,
I stopped counting days after the fourth one passed with no positive feedback from the private investigator that I was paying to find her. My day continued in this specific set of routines that had characterized my life recently: waking before dawn/with Sedona’s name already in my mouth like a held breath, checking my phone for messages that never came, making coffee I barely tasted, dropping Nick at school, spending hours staring at reports that told me nothing new, picking Nick up from school, answering his question about his mother with the same deflection ant lying to him, that she was coming back, putting him to bed, lying awake until two or three in the morning running the same thoughts, trying to figure out where she might have gone.
She was somewhere. People didn’t simply cease to exist. She was somewhere, and I was going to find her.
The private investigator I’d hired-Marcus Reeve, recommended by my lawyer as the best in Chicago, a former FBI agent who’d found missing persons in twelve countries-had been working for six days and had called this morning with a report that was basically listing out his failures on paper.
Logan’s POV
“She’s good,” he’d said, in speaking in a tone that was reluctantly showing his awe in her persistence to remain not found.
“I did the basics and found out that there has been no credit card activity since the day she left your house. The phone was completely dead, the number had been deactivated and reassigned to a new person, and there was no forwarding information, to where we could reach her. No hotel registrations under her name. No airline bookings. No rental car agreements that we could track down.” A pause.
“Whoever helped her leave did it thoroughly. This wasn’t improvised.”
Cameron. Whoever he was, whatever his relationship to Sedona, he’d helped her disappear out of his life entirely without leaving any crumbs.
I thanked Reeve for the ones that he had done, even no news was still news. I told him to keep looking, and sat in my office staring at the wall until Mrs. Peterson knocked to say Nick was home from school.
My son came in looking the way he’d looked every day for the past week-smaller, somehow, as though the uncertainty was physically compressing him. He dropped his backpack by the door, which he wasn’t supposed to do, and I didn’t say anything about it.
“Is Mom home?”
“Not yet.”
He nodded, like he’d expected that answer, and went to watch television. He didn’t ask why anymore. He’d stopped asking why four days ago, which was worse, But confronting that was just me poking the sleeping bear, I had no reason to give him, even if he asked why, so I allowed myself not to feel guilty, having this easy way out.
I was still sitting there, achieving nothing, when I heard voices from the front hallway. My mother’s voice, was loud enough to be heard from the foyer, demanding something from the nanny, and I could hear Mrs Peterson quiet responses. Whatever she had told her, my mum was not satisfied with it, as I heard her heels making a noise as she walked towards me, the heel noise getting louder with every step she took..
Sherry appeared in my office doorway a moment later, wearing the expression she used for situations she’d already decided the outcome of. And now just informing the person of what was going to happen.
“Logan, we need to talk.” She said without preamble as I shook my head breathing heavily, not in the mood to hear anything she had to say at the moment, I had far important things to focus on. But my mum, being who she is, refused to hear no for an answer.
“Not now, Mom.”
“Now.” She came in and sat across from my desk without being invited, setting her handbag precisely on her knee. “This has gone on long enough. You’re neglecting your work, you’re distressing Nick, and you’ve hired some private detective to chase a woman who clearly does not want to be found. This needs to stop.”
“I’m not discussing this with you.”
“You are going to discuss it because someone needs to speak sense to you.” She folded her hands. “Sedona left the marriage. She signed divorce papers and she left. That’s a message, Logan. A clear message. The gracious thing to do is accept it. You gave her a good life here, she lacked nothing, you were not abusive to her, but it still wasn’t enough for her and she chose to travel; with her boy toy. You staying here, searching for her, gives the explanation that you are pathetic and begging for scraps, and i will not let my son get to this point.”
“She’s sick.” My voice came out flat, controlled, hiding the thing underneath it that wanted to destroy the room, that wanted me to lose my cool on my mume, because she was still certain that Sedona was someone who shouldn’t be given a second of my time..
“She has cancer. Did you know that? She was diagnosed the day we were in Disneyland. Stage three gastric cancer, three months to live, and she called me to tell me and I hung up on her because I was busy.”
Something moved across my mother’s face. Not guilt-Sherry didn’t do guilt easily-but something adjacent to it, something uneasy. “I didn’t know that.”
“No. Because none of us were paying attention.” I pushed back from my desk and stood, needing to move. “She came home that day to an empty house. You were there, weren’t you? You were there when she got home from the hospital.”
Sherry’s expression shifted, became guarded.
“What did you say to her?” I asked. “That day, when she came home with her diagnosis. What did you say to her?”
“Logan-“
“What did you say to her, Mom?”
The silence stretched long enough to be its own answer.
“You told her why I married her, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question. I’d been turning it over in my mind for days, trying to find another explanation for why Sedona had seemed so profoundly resigned when I’d seen her at the hospital. Not angry-resigned. Like someone who’d had their worst suspicions confirmed. “You told her she was a Katherine replacement. That she was nobody without me.”
“I told her the truth,” Sherry said, her voice stiffening. “She had unrealistic expectations-“
“She was a woman with a death sentence who’d just been told she had three months to live, and you were in our house telling her she’d never been wanted.” The control I’d been maintaining cracked, just slightly, just enough for the thing underneath to show. “And then she went upstairs alone and stayed there alone and I didn’t call back, and Nick called her pathetic, and she spent the night alone in our house with a cancer diagnosis and nothing else.”
“You’re being dramatic, I did not say any lie to her, besides she knew about it, she just needed the coinfirmation-“
Logan’s POV
“Grandma told me she looked broken when she went back to the family house to return the heirloom that showed she was the wife of this family. Her exact words.”
I turned to face my mother fully. “She looked broken when she came to say goodbye. And you were the last person to speak to her before that. In our house, when she came home from a hospital where she’d just been told she was dying. And you told her she was nothing. That she was someone who was temporarily holding the position for someone’s else. You called the mother of my child, a placeholder in her husband’s house…”
“I told her the reality of her situation-“
“You told a dying woman that her husband never loved her and her son would be better off without her.” My voice rose, and I didn’t stop it, shouting at this point as she looked taken back. She did not expect that I would lose my cool with her, especially something that concerned Sedona when she knew how laidback I was, even when people walked all over her.
“You have spent years telling Sedona she wasn’t good enough, that she didn’t belong, that Katherine was superior in every possible way. You spent three years doing it in front of Nick, and then you’re surprised that he started saying it too?. He said what he heard adults saying.”
Sherry’s composure cracked as she tried to defend herself, using half baked excuses. “I was looking out for this family-“.
“You were looking out for your vision of this family, yes. Your version, not the version that was already here. Which didn’t include Sedona. It never included Sedona.” I moved around the desk, closer to my mother, keeping my voice controlled now with effort. “You know what she did, Mom? She saved every one of Nick’s baby teeth. Sewed care labels into every item of clothing I own. Made sure the nanny knew where every medicine was kept in case of emergency. Prepared for every contingency. Made every small thing in this house run smoothly, invisibly, without recognition or thanks. And she did all of this while you were telling her she was worthless and I was busy proving it.”
“Logan-“
