Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 127

Chapter 116; The Statker Incident

JENNIFER POV

Parker had come to the hospital that morning while I was still there.

The grocery store was mine now. That was the small thing I’d claimed.

Claim

I moved from apples to pears, because the blood orange situation with Dante Wells had clarified that Sedona’s palate was more flexible than she’d been letting on, and pears were gentle enough to be reliably edible across the full range of treatment days.

That was when the man appeared.

Not appeared dramatically-not from nowhere, not with any kind of announcement. He simply fell into step beside me the way people sometimes did in grocery stores, in the produce section especially, where the displays required lateral movement and people ended up briefly parallel without planning to. I registered him peripherally-tall, well-dressed in the functional way of someone who wore good clothes without being vain about them, a coat that was Chicago rather than Seattle in its weight and cut.

I looked at the pears.

He looked at the pears.

“Mrs. Preston,” he said.

I went still.

Not visibly-I had forty years of practice at receiving unexpected things without showing the receive. But internally, completely, the specific stillness of a woman who has just understood that the ordinary morning she’d been having has changed shape.

He knew my name. He’d used my name before I’d turned to look at him, which meant he’d recognized me before I’d recognized him, which meant he’d been looking for me, which meant this was not a coincidence of produce sections.

I turned.

The face assembled itself into someone I didn’t recognize.

“Logan Hayes,” he said, as if confirming what I’d already arrived at. “I’m-I’m Sedona’s husband.”

The produce section was quiet around us. A woman with a stroller at the far end, a man consulting a list near the citrus. The ordinary Tuesday morning of a grocery store that didn’t know it was suddenly containing something significant.

I looked at him.

He looked back at me with the expression of a man who had prepared for this conversation and was trying to stay inside the preparation, which I recognized because I’d been in enough difficult conversations to know what staying inside a rehearsal looked like. Controlled. Careful. The slightly over-precise

1.3

The Stalker incident

articulation of someone making sure each word was the intended one.

“I know who you are,” I said.

Claim

“I thought you might.” A pause. “I’ve been in Seattle for several days.” He stopped, reorganized, continued. “I know that Sedona has indicated she doesn’t want contact. received that message through Cameron. I understand that she’s that things are complicated and that she’s in the middle of treatment and that my-that there are reasons.” He was managing the sentence with effort. “But I need to see her. I need the opportunity to speak to her directly. Whatever she decides after that, whatever she-I just need her to hear me.”

I held the pear in my hand. It was perfectly ripe, giving slightly at the stem end, exactly what I’d been looking for. I noticed this in the peripheral way you noticed small things when the main event required your primary attention.

“She’s told Cameron she doesn’t want contact,” I said. “Cameron communicated that to you.”

“I know.”

“Then you understand-”

“She hasn’t heard from me directly.” His voice had the quality of someone who had been rehearsing an argument and believed in it, who was presenting it not with aggression but with the conviction of someone who thought they were right. “She’s made a decision based on what Cameron has told her, but we haven’t actually spoken. She hasn’t given me the chance to-”

“She doesn’t owe you a chance,” I said.

The words came.out levelly. Not loudly, not with the heat I felt underneath them, because this was a grocery store and this man was not worth a scene, and more importantly because I was Parker Preston’s wife and Jennifer Kim’s daughter and I had been conducting difficult conversations with composure for forty years and I was not going to stop now.

He received it. I watched him receive it-the small adjustment of a man who’d been hit by something he’d expected intellectually and was now experiencing physically.

“I know she doesn’t owe me-”

す

“She doesn’t owe you a conversation,” I said. “She doesn’t owe you access. She doesn’t owe you the chance to explain yourself at a time and in a way that is convenient for you, when the time and method that was convenient for her-when she called you from a hospital waiting room because she was frightened and she was your wife and she needed someone-that time was not honored.”

He was very still.

“I’m not-” He started.

“I’m not angry at you,” I said, which was partially true. I was angry, but the anger was mine to manage, not his to receive in a grocery store where he hadn’t done anything aggressive and where my daughter was twenty minutes away in a hospital room that she needed to be peaceful. “I’m telling you that my daughter has communicated what she wants, and what she wants is to focus on getting better. That’s not a negotiating position. That’s a decision she’s made about her own life, which she has every right to make.”

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