Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 157

Chapter 150: Daily Walks and Picnic Dates

Sedona’s POV

We walked.

Clam

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.

“It’s big,” he said.

“My father planted it the year I was born,” I said. “So it’s twenty-eight years old.”

Drew looked at the tree, then at me, doing the math. “Trees grow slowly,” he said.

“Yes.”

<Daily Walks and Picnic Dates 1

Claim

“But they get very big If you give them enough time,” he said, with the tone of someone noting a principle That applied broadly and not just to trees.

He reached up and touched one of the remaining leaves-red, deep, One of the remaining leaves that lasted longer than the others and had not yet fallen off like the rest. He turned it over in his fingers. Looked at it against the sky.

“Selective,” he said, mostly to himself.

“What is?” I asked.

“The tree,” he said. “It keeps some and lets go of some. It chooses which to let go and which to hold onto.” He looked at the leaf in his hand. “Can I have this?”

“It’s not mine to give,” I said. “But I think the tree would be okay with it.”

He put it carefully in the small backpack.

Evidence, I thought. He was collecting evidence.

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