Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 156

Hospital Checkup-2

Claim

“You’ve been listening to it do alarming things for two months. That’s different,” he said. “Now listen to it do ordinary things, normal bodies do like getting tired easily and learning when to stop and rest. It’s a different skill.”

I started the walks that afternoon.

Just around the neighborhood, the streets I’d grown up in. My mother offered to come. I said thank you and went alone, which she received with the expression of someone choosing not to push and understanding the choosing to be alone.

The first walk lasted fourteen minutes.

That was not nothing. That was a fact I had to remind myself of when fourteen minutes felt like a lot less than it should be for a person who had once run to school because she was late and because running had been easy.

Day two: seventeen minutes.

Day three: Dante was there.

He’d appeared at ten in the morning with food, as he did, and I’d said I was going for my walk and he’d said he’d come, with the specific casualness of someone for whom this was an obvious thing to say. He didn’t ask for permission, he just said it in a causal way and I didn’t have the mind to turn him away.

We walked.

He matched my pace without comment, which was the thing about Dante that I had been adding up over time. He didn’t walk at his natural pace and wait for me to catch up. He didn’t slow in the deliberate way of someone making an adjustment to adjust to my pace. He simply walked at whatever pace I was walking, without thinking twice about it.

I noticed this. I didn’t say anything about it.

“The leaves are almost gone,” Dante said, looking at the tree we were passing by.

“They’ll come back,” I said.

۴

“Mm.” He looked at it for another moment. “Drew is going to be upset. He’s been cataloguing them.”

“Cataloguing them?”

“He’s been collecting specific leaves. He has a system-he selects them by color gradient, darkest to lightest. He has them pressed in a book at home. Where he goes through it everyday and loves writing down things that he had noticed about it” “He’ll be put out when the supply ends.”

“Tell him they’ll be back in the spring,” I said.

“He knows they’ll be back in the spring,” Dante said. “He’s cataloguing them anyway. He likes to have evidence of things.”

1.3

Hospital Cheetop-2

Claim

thought about that as we turned at the maple and walked back-a four year old who like to jot down Things of what they had seen because they liked to have something to hold what they’d been before the

change.

Selective, Drew had said, when I’d given him the word.

The Saturday walk.

Drew came.

Dante had said Friday evening that he might bring him-Lake had soccer with Lucian on Saturday morning and Drew would be at loose ends, which was a state Drew managed less well because drew was someone who preferred to stick to a scheduled routine and wanted to know what the day would contain before it came rather than being ambushed with it.

He appeared at the front door at nine-thirty with his father and a small backpack that I understood, from previous experience, contained things Drew considered necessary for uncertain situations that he found himself in and didn’t know how to get away from. A book, probably. Possibly one of the catalogued leaves that he wanted to look at again when he was less busy.

“Good morning,” Drew said, to me.

“Good morning, Drew,” I said.

He looked at the street with the assessing quality he had, the taking-in of a new situation before committing to it.

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