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.

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He Will Be Back

He looked at me.

Claim

“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 picked it up. Ate it.

It was different from regular orange. The smell wasn’t the one that triggered the treatment nausea. It was darker, slightly, with something underneath the citrus that was closer to berry than acid.

“Fine,” I said.

Dante looked at me.

“It’s different,” I said. “The blood orange. The smell is different.”

He said nothing. But the corner of his mouth moved in the specific way it moved when he’d been right about something and had decided that pointing it out was unnecessary because the facts were doing it

for him.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything,” he said.

“You were about to.”

“I was just sitting here.”

“You were sitting here being right at me, which is its own kind of annoying.”

“I’ll work on it,” he said, with no indication whatsoever that he intended to work on it.

Cameron looked between us with the expression he’d been developing all week, the one that was part assessment and part something more complicated that he was choosing not to deploy right now, given the state of his own morning. He looked at Durian. Durian looked back at him. Something communicated between them in the shorthand of twelve years.

“Eat something,” I told Cameron. “My mother will be back with coffee shortly and she will immediately produce food from somewhere, because that’s what she does, and you should let her.”

“I don’t want to explain to Mom why-”

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