Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 157

Chapter 150: Daily Walks and Picnic Dates

Sedona’s POV

We walked.

Drew took my hand somewhere in the middle of the first block, without announcement or anything else. He just slipped his small hand into mine the way children did when they’d decided you were safe and wanted to hold onto you.

I looked down at the small fingers wrapped around mine and thought about Nick, which I always did, whenever I was with a kid. My mind would go back to nick subconsciously.

He was calling me now.

We’d had two more calls since the first one. Both short, both careful, both real in the specific way he’d always been real when you gave him space to be, the Nick who said the unpolished version but the real version which made it all the more better when the call ended because he wants putting up a pretense.

Each call left me fuller than before it and more aware of the distance between us that I needed to work hard on reducing.

“Bird,” Drew said.

I looked where he was looking. A crow on the power line, looking back at us with it’s black beaded eyes letting out a crow.

“Corvus brachyrhynchos,” Drew said.

I looked at him. “What?”

“That’s the scientific name,” he said. “American crow. Lake says they’re boring but they’re actually very intelligent. They can recognize human faces.” A pause. “They remember faces they don’t like.”

“That’s an incentive to be nice to crows,” I said.

“Yes,” Drew said. “I’m always nice to crows.”

I thought about the crow in the hospital garden, the one that had made Molly shriek with delight.

Drew told me about three more birds before we reached the maple tree.

At the maple, he let go of my hand and looked up at the tree with the focused attention he gave to things worth examining.

He put it carefully in the small backpack.

Evidence, I thought. He was collecting evidence.

On the walk back, he took my hand again.

His father walked on his other side, and the three of us went back through the streets of the neighborhood that was mine, back to my family house, and Drew held both our hands and looked at birds, and I thought about Nick and about the distance that was between what I had and what I said wanted and what was building and I could feel forming the shape.

Not yet. But soon. The shape of it was almost visible. I was getting stronger.

The park idea was Lucian’s.

He’d texted on a Thursday-not to me, to Dante, but Dante had shown me the thread with the specific expression of someone who found Lucian’s organizational instincts both impressive and occasionally overwhelming.

*Lake has mentioned Drew seventeen times since the party and doesn’t plan on stopping soon. I have been acting slow to it but Lake is beginning to see through me and has insisted on seeing Drew again. Saturday. The park by the water. I’ll bring food.*

Dante had looked at the message and then at me. “Do you want to go to the park on Saturday?”