Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 118

Chapter 107 Blocked Contact

Sedona’s POV

Dante looked at me briefly-a look I was becoming familiar with, the one that lasted a moment longer than strictly necessary and then moved on with the deliberateness of someone managing something that he wasn’t willing to share. “She still has it,” he said. I’ve seen her move around the room. The footwork doesn’t go away.”

“The footwork,” Cameron said, with the tone of someone storing that observation in a specific location, nodding his head in mock disbelief that is his way of saying, I was going to ignore the fucking big elephant in the room but know I see through the bullshit.

“Right.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you pretend to accept the information but file the real one away for later use.” I looked at him. “I recognize it because you’ve been doing it since you were eight.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Cameron said, with the complete absence of conviction of someone who knew exactly what I was talking about.

Durian made another small sound that he converted, this time more successfully, into a cough.

Cameron pulled out his phone.

I watched him navigate to contacts with the focused intention of someone who’d been thinking about making a specific call for a while and had decided this was the moment. He found what he was looking for, pressed call, put the phone to his ear.

Waited.

The expression on his face shifted as he waited, from professional look, to something less controlled and more feeling like (hurt) when he realized something had happened.

He pulled the phone away from his ear.

Looked at the screen.

“It went to a different voicemail,” he said. The words came out with the specific flatness of someone whose voice had made a decision before the rest of them had caught up. “A standard carrier voicemail. Not his.”

“Whose?” I asked.

“My-” He stopped. “Someone from work.” He looked at the screen for another moment, something working in his expression that he was visibly trying to stop from working. “His line is blocked.”

“Why would his line be blocked?”

Cameron didn’t answer immediately. He put the phone down on his knee and looked at it, and the look was-it was not a professional look, it was not the look Cameron used for people from work whose lines had gone to voicemail. It was a different kind of look,one that I have never seen Cameron directed to anyone who wasn’t family.

“Cameron,” I said quietly. “What did you do?”

He looked up. Met my eyes. “I told you I made a bad decision.

“You blocked his number?”

“He blocked his number,” Durian said, with none of the laughter from earlier, just the straightforward information of someone filling in facts. “After he-” He looked at Cameron. “Do you want to tell her, or-”

“I fired him,” Cameron said.

The room was quiet.

“The person-” I stopped. Looked at my brother, at the phone on his knee. “Cameron.”

Cameron looked at him. “He has my main number blocked as well. My office line. He was-” He stopped. “He was thorough about it.”

“sss,” Dante said.

“His work sss has been deactivated. His personal sss-I have it but using it now would be-” Cameron shook his head. “It would be the wrong approach.”

“Then go to him,” Dante said, with the directness of someone for whom the solution to most problems was movement toward the problem rather than away from it. “If he’s blocked every remote option, go in person. People block phones and emails. They can’t block a door.”

Cameron looked at him for a moment. “That’s either very wise or very alarming.”

“Probably both,” Dante said. “Most useful things are.”

“He can’t go today,” Durian said. “He needs water, food, and approximately six more hours of not being vertical.” He looked at Cameron with the look of someone who had been managing his bullshit for a long time and knew better than him.

“Tomorrow. When you’re capable of having a conversation that you’ll remember and that he’ll be able to take seriously.”

“He’s not going to want to see me.”

“He blocked your number,” I said. “Which is not the same as not wanting to see you. It’s wanting some control over when contact happens. People who genuinely don’t want to see you don’t bother blocking numbers-they just don’t answer.” I looked at my brother, this man who managed everything for everyone and had apparently been sitting on something significant for long enough that it had finally come loose at an inconvenient moment. “Go tomorrow. In person. Tell him whatever the true thing is.”

“The true thing is complicated.”

“The true thing is always complicated. Say it anyway.”

He looked at me, and then at his phone, and then out the window at Seattle in the morning-the city that was his the way it was mine, the streets we’d both grown up on, the particular light that fell differently here than anywhere else.

“You sound like Mom,” he said.