Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 117

Chapter 106: Broken Hearts

Sedona’s POV

The room went briefly electric.

Cameron opened his eyes and looked at Durian with an expression that contained several layers of communication, the topmost of which was a clear and specific instruction to stop talking, and the layers underneath which were more complicated and which Durian received with complete equanimity and absolutely no intention of following.

“A broken heart,” I repeated.

“It’s not-” Cameron started.

“Who is she?” I asked immediately, sitting up straighter. The fruit argument was gone, the blood orange was forgotten, Dante’s careful taxonomy of citrus varieties had been completely displaced by the far more interesting fact that Cameron Preston, who had been deflecting questions about his personal life since approximately age nineteen, had apparently experienced something significant enough to drink about. “Cameron. Who is she? How long has this been going on? Why haven’t you told me-you know I’ve been here for weeks and you could have-”

Durian made a sound.

It started as a contained sound, the sound of someone suppressing something, and then it became less contained, and then it became not contained at all-full, genuine laughter, the kind that arrived before you’d had time to decide whether to let it out, the kind that had something surprised in it like even the person laughing hadn’t expected the volume of it.

He laughed for a solid five seconds, which in a hospital room was a significant amount of time.

Cameron looked at him with an expression that had moved past the instruction to stop talking and into something that more closely resembled a specific and detailed threat.

“Sorry,” Durian said, not sounding sorry. “Sorry, it’s just-the she-” He pressed his lips together, visibly working to contain something that clearly did not want to be contained. “The assumption. It’s-” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

I looked at him. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing,” he said, in the tone of someone for whom nothing was definitively something. “Just-I appreciate your enthusiasm for Cameron’s love life. It’s very-sibling of you.”

“Why is that funny?”

“It’s not funny,” he said, with an expression that said it was extremely funny to him specifically and that the reason he wasn’t sharing was one he’d made a deliberate decision about. “I was just-smiling. At the enthusiasm.”

I looked at Cameron.

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Cameron was looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man who was calculating the structural Integrity of the hospital ceiling and wondering if it could be persuaded to fall on him.

“Cameron,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it

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“You never want to talk about it. You haven’t wanted to talk about it for twenty years. I am your sister and I am in a hospital and I have been through-gestured at myself, at the room, at the general situation, “-a significant amount, and I am telling you that whatever this is, I want to know.”

He looked at me from the ceiling.

“I’m not talking about it,” he said.

“Durian,” I said. “Who is she?”

Durian opened his mouth.

“Durian,” Cameron said, in a tone that was approximately at the geological level of a tectonic plate-slow and massive and containing the specific promise of consequences.

Durian closed his mouth.

Smiled.

Said nothing.

Which was, I understood, its own kind of answer-the answer of someone who knew something and had made a decision about how much of it was theirs to share. He wasn’t going to tell me. But he also wasn’t going to pretend there was nothing to tell, and the laughter that had escaped him at the word *she* was still sitting in the room like evidence.

Something about the laughter. The specific quality of it, the way it had arrived at the word she and not anywhere else in the conversation.

I filed that away.

“Are you all right?” I asked Cameron, switching registers, because teasing him was satisfying but it wasn’t actually the priority. He was in my hospital room at eleven in the morning having been brought here by his friend because he’d been drinking, and even if he wasn’t going to tell me why, I was his sister.

He looked at me, and the ceiling-gazing and the deflection and the particular armor of Cameron when he was protecting something dropped just slightly. Just enough for me to see underneath it.

“I made a bad decision last night,” he said. “About something at work. I’m-” He stopped. “I’m going to have to sort it out.”

“A bad decision about the person with the broken heart situation?”

“Sedona.”

“I’m just asking.”

“I know what you’re just asking.” He rubbed his face with both hands, the gesture of someone tired in a

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Broken Heals-

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way that sleep hadn’t fully addressed: “It’s complicated. And I will-when I’ve sorted it out, when I know what’s actually happening, I’ll tell you. I promise.” He looked at me with the specific look he used when he was making an actual promise rather than a deflection-shaped promise. “Not today. But I’ll tell you.”

“Okay,” I said.

Durian had settled into his chair with the comfortable ease of someone who’d decided he was staying, and was looking around the room with the frank curiosity of a person who absorbed new environments. His gaze landed on Dante, who had been watching the whole exchange with the contained amusement of someone who’d decided this family was very entertaining and he was glad to be in proximity to it.

“Dante Wells,” Durian said. “I thought I recognized you. You played Enzo Marchetti about three years ago in the quarterfinals in Montreal.”

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