Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 126

Chapter 115: He Will Comet

Cameron’s POV

“All right.” His voice had returned to the professional register, the clean level quality, but underneath it something had changed that hadn’t been there at the beginning of the call. “I’ll see you at eleven.”

“I’ll tell Caroline to expect you.”

“Tell her the Meridian file has a supplementary note in the second appendix that she may have missed. It’ll make the briefing faster.”

“Of course there’s a supplementary note in the second appendix.”

“There’s always a supplementary note,” he said, and this time the not-quite-smile was audible. “I’ll see you at eleven, Cameron.”

He ended the call.

I put the phone down on the desk and looked at it.

Eleven o’clock. Four hours and forty-six minutes.

I picked the phone back up and called Durian.

He answered on the first ring. “Well?”

“He’s coming back. He’ll be here at eleven.”

A pause in which I could hear Durian deciding how much satisfaction to express. “And the other thing?”

“He wants to have a conversation,” I said. “When the immediate professional urgencies are handled.”

Durian was quiet for a moment. Then: “Cameron.”

“Yes.”

–

“That’s-that’s a good outcome. From where you started Monday night, that’s a significantly better outcome than was likely.”

“I know.”

“How do you feel?”

I looked at the Singapore file in the corner of my desk. At the weather note I’d been thinking about since I’d read it. At the empty chair outside the glass wall, four hours and forty-six minutes from being occupied by someone who noticed things and filed them away and had been filing specific things away and had just told me, in the careful precise language of a person who didn’t waste words, that he had something to say when there was time to say it.

“Like I should have said the true thing eleven months ago,” I said.

He Will Come

“Probably,” Durian agreed. “But you said it now. That’s what’s available.”

“The morning is available,” I said.

“What?”

“Something someone told me recently. About what’s available.”

“Wise person.”

“She’s getting wiser.” I looked at the window. “I’m going to call her.”

“Your sister?”

“She’s going to say I told you so.”

“She’s going to say I told you so while being gracious about it,” Dufian said. “Which is worse, but also better.”

“Yes.” I paused. “Thank you. For Monday night. For-all of it.”

“You’d have done the same.”

“I would have,” I said, and meant it, and ended the call.

I sat for a moment longer.

Then I called Sedona.

She answered on the third ring with the voice she had when she was awake but still horizontal, the slightly slower quality of someone in a hospital bed who had all the time that existing in a hospital bed gave you.

“Cameron,” she said. “It’s early.”

“It’s eight-thirty.”

“I know when it is.” A pause. “Are you all right?”

“He’s coming back,” I said. “The person from work. I called him this morning and he’s coming back.”

Silence.

“That’s a very low bar.”

“I know,” she said, and I could hear the smile in it, the real one, the one I’d been hearing more of since she’d come home. “That’s why I said it.”

I laughed. Quietly, genuinely, the laugh of someone who’d been through a significant forty-eight hours and had arrived somewhere better than they’d started.

Outside, Seattle began its Tuesday, indifferent and constant, the rain doing what the rain did.

Four hours and thirty-one minutes until eleven o’clock.

I had work to do.

I picked up the Singapore file, turned to the second appendix, and found the supplementary note exactly where he’d said it would be.

Of course it was there.

It was always going to be there.

That was the thing about Lucian Park-he left notes in margins and supplementary appendices and the edges of things, careful and specific, for the people who were paying attention enough to find them.

I was paying attention.

Finally, properly, in all the ways that mattered-I was paying attention.

I started reading.

JENNIFER POV

The apples were the problem.

Not in any serious way.

I turned one over in my hands, checking the skin, the stem end, the particular weight of it.

Too large.

I put it back and moved along the display. Parker had always done the grocery shopping in our marriage- not because I couldn’t, but because he’d taken it over somewhere in the first decade and it had become his,, and I’d spent forty-one years married to a man who came home with specific cheeses and the right variety of apple and produce that was exactly ripe.

This was the third grocery run I’d done since Sedona had come home.

The first two had been functional but slightly wrong-wrong yogurt, wrong bread, the tea bags that looked right but weren’t the ones. I’d been recalibrating, learning the specific requirements of feeding a daughter who was navigating chemotherapy’s particular relationship with taste and smell and appetite, learning that what worked on Tuesday might not work on Thursday, that the things Sedona could eat were a moving target I needed to track without making the tracking obvious.