Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 119

Chapter 108: He’ll Be Back

Sedona’s POV

“Mom is very wise.”

“Mom is terrifyingly wise and I’ve been trying to avoid her being wise at me about this specific topic for-” He stopped.

“For how long?” I asked.

He was quiet.

“Cameron. How long have you been sitting on this?”

Another pause, longer, the pause of a man counting backward through something he’d been tracking without admitting he was tracking it.

“Eighteen months,” he said.

The room was very quiet.

Durian looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone who knew this number and had been waiting for it to be said out loud and was now experiencing the specific satisfaction of that happening.

Dante looked at me. I looked at Dante. Something passed between us that didn’t require words-the understanding of two people who’d each been sitting on something for longer than was efficient and had some experience with what that cost.

“Eighteen months,” I said to Cameron.

“Yes,”

“And you’ve told-”

“Durian,” he said. “Only Durian. And only because he-” He glanced at Durian with an expression that contained twelve years of specific history. “He has an unfortunate ability to notice things.”

“It’s a gift,” Durian agreed.

“It’s a curse,” Cameron said. “For everyone around you.”

“Same thing,” Durian said, which was what Dante had said about coherent strategy and wise or alarming things, and I wondered briefly whether that was just what it sounded like when people who were built similarly talked to each other.

I looked at my brother-Cameron, who had carried something for eighteen months without telling anyone except a friend who’d found out by watching too carefully, Cameron who managed everything and had apparently found the one thing he couldn’t manage cleanly, Cameron who had fired someone and come to his sister’s hospital room the next morning with his equilibrium comprehensively disrupted.

“Hey,” I said.

He looked at me.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said. “Whatever this is, whatever complicated means in this specific situation- it’s going to be all right Because you’re Cameron, and Cameron figures things out. Even when they’re hard. Even when they take eighteen months longer than they should have.paused. “But you have to go. Tomorrow. In person. You have to say the true thing.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“Yeah,” he said. The word came out rough at the edges, the way his words got when something had gotten through the armor. “Yeah, I know.”

Durian reached over and put a hand briefly on Cameron’s shoulder-the same gesture he’d apparently used last night, the rare physical reassurance of someone who didn’t use it cheaply. Cameron received it with the stillness of someone who’d needed it and was acknowledging that without saying so.

Dante quietly peeled a segment of blood orange and set it on the table beside me without comment.

“I don’t want to explain to Mom why-”

“You don’t have to explain anything. Just eat whatever she gives you and let her fuss.” I looked at him. “She Tikes having people to feed. It gives her somewhere to put the caring. Let her.”

He leaned his head back against the chair. Closed his eyes. “Okay.”

“Okay,” I said.

The room settled into its particular quiet-the rain at the window, the distant sounds of the hospital, Cameron with his eyes closed and his phone on his knee with its blocked number, Durian looking out at Seattle with the comfortable ease of a man at rest, Dante handing me another segment of blood orange without being asked.

I ate it.

Sat in my hospital bed in the city I’d come home to, surrounded by the people I’d come home to, and thought about Cameron and his eighteen months of something he hadn’t named yet, and about the number that was blocked, and about going in person tomorrow to say the true thing.

And I thought, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that we were a family that had spent a great deal of time not saying the true things, and had spent a great deal of time paying for it, and was perhaps-finally, slowly, imperfectly-beginning to learn the alternative.

Outside, Seattle rained on.

My mother came through the door twelve minutes later with coffee and, from somewhere that I still didn’t understand, a container of food that she pressed into Cameron’s hands before she’d fully processed that she didn’t know why he was there or who Durian was.

She’d ask later..

For now: she fed him.

That was enough.