Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 170

Thinking About It

Sedona’s POV

Claim

“You file things,” he said. “When things are too much at once. You receive them and you put them in a place for later. I’ve watched you do it.” He said it without judgment. “I didn’t want this to be something you filed.”

I looked at the water through the window.

He was right that I filed things. I’d been doing it for months, for years if I was honest-the things that were too large or too complicated or too requiring of energy I didn’t have, I’d put them in a place that was labeled for later and I’d gotten on with the next thing. Logan had probably spent three years being filed. The tennis career had been filed so thoroughly that it had taken Dante sitting in a hospital chair to remind me it had existed.

This felt different from the things I filed.

“I wasn’t expecting it,” I said. “Even with everyone telling me.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s one thing to hear it from other people. It’s another to hear it from the person.”

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.

“Drew,” I said. “He took my hand on the walk. He invited me to a playdate. He told me I laugh like you.” I looked at Dante. “He knows something. He’s four years old and he knows something.”

Dante was quiet for a moment. “He knows I talk about you,” he said. “He knows you were sick and that I was worried. He knows-” He paused. “He knows that when I mention your name I use a different voice from the one I use for most things. He’s perceptive. He picks up on what I don’t say.”

“He’s like you,” I said.

“He’s better than me,” Dante said. “He acts on what he notices. I took a long time to come to a hospital.”

I almost smiled. “You came eventually.”

“I came eventually,” he agreed.

The tea was cooling. The moment felt peaceful and calm, even with him confessing, there wasn’t turmoil or fear in me, just tranquility, like trying to understand what to feel about his words.

“I don’t know what I feel,” I said. “I want to be honest with you about that.”

“I know,” he said.

“There’s-there’s a lot,” I said. “There’s the divorce that isn’t final yet. There’s Nick and all of that. There’s the treatment that isn’t done, the December appointment, the things that are still unresolved.” I paused. “There’s the fact that I’ve spent three years in a marriage that cost me things I’m still finding out the full

13

Thinking Abe

price of, and I don’t trust my own judgment about-” I stopped.

“About what you feel,” he said.

“About whether what feel is real or whether it’s gratitude or proximity or the specific effect of someone being kind to you when you’re at the worst point of your life.” I looked at him. “You’ve been very good to me, Dante. For months. And I don’t know how to separate-I can’t look at what I feel and know which part is you and which part is what you’ve done.”

“That’s honest,” he said.

“I’m trying to be.”

“I’d rather have honest than comfortable,” he said. “I’ve known that about you since you were sixteen.”

“What did you know about me at sixteen?” I asked.

“That you didn’t waste shots,” he said. “That when you hit something, you’d thought about it. You weren’t reactive. You were deliberate.” He paused. “You hit things like you meant them. Even when you were losing.”

I thought about that match. The third set, seven-five, the cramped muscle in the second game that had cost me the momentum I’d been building.

“I should have beaten you,” I said.

“You were going to beat me,” he said. “The cramping was bad luck.”

“I’ve thought about that match a lot,” I said. “Across the years.”

“Me too,” he said. “More than makes sense, probably, for a match that was fifteen years ago.” He looked at me. “That’s part of what I’m telling you. It’s been a long time that you’ve been somewhere in my thinking.”

I looked at the table.

A long time. He’d asked around the circuit for two years after I’d left. He’d held some version of me in his mind across fifteen years of being somewhere else entirely, across a professional career and a relationship that had ended and a child and the full complicated accumulation of a life.

That wasn’t nothing.

“I need time,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“Not because-“I stopped. “I’m not saying no. I’m saying I don’t know yet, and I need to know before I say anything else.”

“That’s the right answer,” he said. “For you. I know how you make decisions. I’m not expecting you to have this one in a lunch.”

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