Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 121

Chapter 110: Monster From Work
Cameron’s POV
“Sit down,” she said, in the tone of someone for whom hospitality was not optional even for people arriving unannounced who may or may not be responsible for her household’s recent professional disruption. She gestured toward the living room. “Please.”
I went in because refusing felt worse than accepting.
The apartment was-it was not what I’d expected, and I kept arriving at that sentence and not knowing how to complete it. It was small. Not cramped, but small in the way of spaces that had been used efficiently for a long time, where everything had a place and the place had been chosen with thought. The furniture was old-genuinely old, not vintage-affected-old but old in the way of things that had been kept because they were good rather than replaced because something newer was available.
There was a bookshelf that took up most of one wall, packed with the specific density of someone who’d bought books faster than they’d found shelf space for them, paperbacks horizontal on top of vertical rows, a system of sorts but not a decorative one. A child’s drawings on the refrigerator, visible through the kitchen doorway. A plant on the windowsill that had been there long enough to need staking.
On the side table near the sofa, a framed photograph. I looked at it without meaning to look at it-the reflex of eyes in a new space, cataloguing.
Lucian, younger, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, with Lake as an infant-the particular overwhelmed tenderness of someone holding a very new person for the first time and not yet knowing what to do with the feeling. Lily beside him, leaning in. The three of them looking like a unit that had just been established and was in the process of understanding what it was.
Lake had been born when Lucian was twenty-two.
He was twenty-six now.
I sat down on the sofa and looked at my hands and thought about eighteen months of thinking I knew someone because I knew their work.
The salary. Above standard, I’d told HR. Discretionary authority. Three times standard, actually-I’d looked up what the position paid in the market and multiplied it by three and filed it as discretionary because I’d wanted to and because I could and because I hadn’t examined very carefully what that wanting meant.
He hadn’t told me. He’d been receiving a salary three times standard for eighteen months and he hadn’t queried it, hadn’t mentioned it, hadn’t-
He lived here. He was receiving a salary that should have put him comfortably somewhere with better fixtures and a second bedroom for the child, and he lived here, in this apartment with its old furniture and its full bookshelf and its child’s drawings on the refrigerator.
He was saving it. Or sending it somewhere. Or some other thing that was none of my business and that I didn’t know because I’d been paying close attention to the work for eighteen months and not asking about anything outside it.
1.3
Monster From Work
+heard footsteps.
Clamm
Small ones first-Lake, returning, at the speed children traveled when they’d completed a mission and were reporting back. Then heavier ones, less regular than usual, the footsteps of someone who’d gotten up from somewhere they’d been horizontal.
Lake came around the corner first, with the momentum of someone who’d been running and hadn’t fully decelerated, and stopped when he saw me on the sofa. He looked at me with those eyes. Looked back over his shoulder at his father, who was coming through the doorway carrying him now-had scooped him up in the motion of entering, the automatic gesture of someone for whom carrying this specific person was so ingrained it happened without decision.
Lucian looked like he’d slept badly and woken recently. His hair, which was always neat in the office- always, without exception, the kind of neat that suggested he paid attention to it-was doing something that could generously be described as a bird’s nest and could more accurately be described as evidence of a night that had involved a pillow and significant distress and not much else. He was wearing a shirt that had not been recently ironed and sweatpants, which was a combination I had never in eighteen months associated with Lucian Park and which landed with the specific strangeness of seeing a familiar landscape rearranged.
He saw me.
The expression on his face did several things in rapid sequence. Surprise first-genuine, not performed, the surprise of someone who had not expected this specific development. Then something more controlled coming down over the surprise, the professional composure that was apparently still available even in sweatpants with a four-year-old on his hip and a hair situation that defied description.
Then-underneath both of those, present but managed-something that was not happy. Not the anger of someone who’d had a night to build into anger, but something quieter and more specific, the expression of someone who’d been hurt and had processed it past the acute phase into the settled weight of it.
“Cameron,” he said.
His voice was level. Of course it was level.
Lake gasped.
It was a theatrical gasp, the full-body commitment of a four-year-old receiving confirmation of something significant. He turned from his father’s face to mine and back again with the rapid attention of someone cross-referencing data.
“Daddy,” he said, in the voice of someone making a very important announcement. “Is this him?”
Lucian looked at his son. Something moved across his face that was not quite amusement and not quite exasperation and was probably the specific combination of both that parenting small children produced on a regular basis. “Lake-”
“Is this the monster?” Lake said, loudly and with complete conviction.
The room was very quiet.
I looked at Lake.
Monster From Work
Claim
Lake looked at me with the evaluative focus of a child who had received a description of something and was now comparing it against the reality, conducting the assessment with great seriousness.
“The monster from last night,” Lake said, to me directly now, with the candor of a person who hadn’t yet learned that some things were thought rather than said. “From Daddy’s story. The one that took his job.” He tilted his head, still looking at me. “You look like a regular person.”
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