Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 110

Durian looked at me for a moment, recalibrating as he realized that whatever I was going through was huge enough to get me in this mess, looking miserable, I think this is the first time he had seen me in this particular kind of state which was saying something on its own. “What happened?”

I drank.

“Cameron.” His voice shifted from the register he used for the ambient commentary into something more direct and probing, trying to find the problem before professing a solution. “What happened tonight? The call was-you sounded wrong on the phone.”

“I went to the office.”

“And?”

I turned the glass in my hands. The bar was quiet at this hour, the midweek crowd thin, the music low enough to be a background noise rather than a sound. A couple at a table near the window, leaning toward each other. A group of three near the door, winding down from something. It was a basic Tuesday, everyone going through their own Tuesday problems.

“He was there,” I said.

Durian was quiet, which was how he received significant information-not filling the space, just taking it in, waiting for more before replying.

“Late,” I said. “Working late. Finishing the Singapore summary I didn’t ask him to finish tonight.” I looked at the glass. “He wasn’t alone.”

“Who was with him?”

“Lyra Cheng.”

A pause. “The events coordinator.”

“She’s been finding reasons to come up to the executive floor for three months.” I heard the flatness in my own voice and recognized it as the sound I made when I was managing something carefully. “I hadn’t put it together until tonight. She was-” I stopped. “She was on my desk. And her hand was on his chest.”

Durian said nothing.

“He wasn’t stopping it,” I said. “He wasn’t- he looked-” I stopped again. The image was specific and unhelpful and was going to continue being unhelpful for longer than I wanted it to, because I realized that Lucian was someone who flushed at people he saw interesting or liked but embarrassed to say something about it. “He looked like someone who’d decided not to stop something.”

“What did you do?”

“I sent her out.”

“And him?”

I drank. Set the glass down. “I let him go.”

The silence that followed was the specific silence of Durian deciding what to do with information he’d received that he had a strong opinion about.

“You fired him,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Because Lyra Cheng had her hand on his chest.”

“Because his professional judgment was-”

“Cameron.” His voice was exactly level. “Don’t.”

I looked at the bar. “His professional judgment-”

“Was compromised by someone who came to his office after hours and sat on your desk. Which is not primarily a failure of his judgment.” Durian turned on his stool to look at me more directly. “You fired him because you couldn’t stand watching it. Say that if you’re going to say anything.”

I said nothing.

“How did he take it?”

“Because I’m the only contact he has.” I turned my glass. “He found her. Knows she’s in Seattle, knows which hospital. Called me last week asking if there was any version where she’d see him.” I paused. “I told Sedona tonight. She said no.”

“And he keeps calling.”

“Apparently.”

The phone started again.

I looked at it for a moment. Thought about Logan Hayes in Chicago, or wherever he was, calling a number that was his only thread to a woman he’d spent three years not seeing and kept abusing emotionally because he figured she was too much of a doormat to fight back.

I picked up.

“Hayes.”

“Cameron.” His voice was different from the first call-less controlled, more raw at the edges, the voice of someone who’d been in a specific kind of sustained pain for long enough that managing it had become difficult. “I need to know if she’s-if you’ve talked to her. If there’s any-”

“I talked to her,” I said,

A pause. “And?”

I looked at the bar. At Durian beside me, watching my face with the careful attention he brought to things that mattered.

I thought about Sedona in her hospital bed saying: *my marriage is finished*.

I thought about the flush on her face when Rachel and Enzo had said what they’d said about Dante Wells, the color she hadn’t been able to manage, the ceiling she’d looked at to avoid anyone seeing what her face was doing.

She had somewhere to be now. She had people who saw her.

“She’s not coming back to you,” I said. “She’s found something better than what you gave her. She doesn’t want to see you, she doesn’t want contact, and she doesn’t need your apologies right now-she needs to focus on getting better, which she’s doing.” I paused. “Let her do that. Look after your son. That’s what she asked-look after Nick, and let her be.”