She Was Never Just the Billionaire’s Wife (Natasha and Chase) novel Chapter 127

(Clarice)

I shouldn’t be here.

I tell myself this in the parking structure.

I tell myself this in the lift.

I tell myself this as I cross the polished floor of the St. Jude's pediatric wing in a wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses that make me look exactly like a woman who’s somewhere she shouldn’t be.

I called the hospital and pretended to be Natasha Warren, confirming Lily’s next appointment.

It turned out to be today.

Sonia is upstairs in her bedroom packing for Paris and refuses to speak to me.

I tell myself I’m only here for a quick look.

The pediatric atrium has a glass wall that overlooks the courtyard fountain.

There’s a row of upholstered chairs facing it for parents who need to pretend, briefly, to be somewhere else.

I take one of the chairs at the far end and angle myself toward the corridor.

Natasha comes out of the lift at three forty.

She comes in with the baby in her arms and a leather bag over one shoulder.

She looks exhausted, but she’s pushing through it in that way women do when stopping is not an option yet.

I forget how to breathe.

She looks exactly like a photograph my mother used to keep on the sideboard.

Me at twenty-eight, in a yellow dress.

I haven’t thought about that picture in thirty years.

But there it is.

The same long neck. The same way of holding a child close, as if the rest of the room has stopped mattering.

She sits down four chairs away from me with the baby on her lap and doesn’t pay any attention to me.

The little girl is quiet.

Small for her age.

Pale in a way that has nothing to do with skin tone.

Natasha bends her head and says something into her daughter's hair I can’t hear.

The sound that wants to come out of me will draw unwanted attention and I clamp down on it by pressing the back of my hand against my mouth.

She’s alone.

There’s no husband with her. No nanny. No friend with a coffee.

Just an exhausted woman with a sick child in a hospital corridor, holding her baby like the baby is the only thing keeping her upright.

I know that posture. I know the precise weight of it.

I sat on a different bench, in a different city, in a different decade, holding a much older boy, and felt exactly that.

The one big difference was that I brought my loneliness upon myself.

I had everything and I threw it away.

Acted as if consequences were not a thing that actually happens, until they all came crashing down on me at once.

For a long, suspended moment I tell myself that I’m going to stand up.

I’m going to walk over to her and say her name, and she’ll look up, and the years will collapse.

She’ll let me hold her baby the way I once held her.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify