Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 156

Hospital Checkup-2

“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.

“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.

“We’re walking,” he said.

“Yes,” I said as I added, knowing that Drew who preferred indoors might not feel comfortable walking outside just because I did it. “You don’t have to come if—”

“I want to come,” he said. The certainty of it was characteristic-Drew didn’t want to do things uncertainly, but when he’d decided he wanted something the wanting was complete and he made sure that the listener knew it because he didn’t back down.

“I’ve been here before but I haven’t walked here.”

“There’s a tree at the end,” I said. “A big maple.”

He looked at me. “Red leaves?”

“Most of them are gone now. But some.”

He considered this. “Okay,” he said, and stepped off the front step with the commitment of someone who had made a final decision about what he was doing and he had a target in mind already and nothing was going to stop him from getting there, not if he could help it at all.