Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 175

Chapter 170

Drew POV

I looked back at my leaf.

I thought about what I knew.

He had been at school twice and at my house once. He was always in a car. He was always watching. He hadn’t done anything, hadn’t come up to me, hadn’t spoken. Just watched.

I thought about whether this was the kind of thing I should tell Dad.

I was pretty sure it was.

The reason I hadn’t told him before was partly because I wasn’t sure enough and partly because of the new face, which I didn’t want to change. But three times was a pattern. I was confident in patterns.

I looked at the leaf one more time.

Put it in the book very carefully.

Stood up and went inside.

Dad was at the kitchen counter. Lucian was sitting on the far stool going through something on a tablet. They both looked at me when I came in.

“Are you cold?” Dad asked. “It’s getting cold out.”

“I’m okay,” I said. I stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment.

“What is it?” Dad asked.

He asked it in the way he asked things now, the new face way, where he was actually looking.

I thought about how to say it accurately without saying more than I was sure of.

“There’s a man,” I said. “He’s been watching. Three times. School twice and the front garden just now.” I paused. “He’s always in a car. He doesn’t come up or talk. He just watches.”

The kitchen went quiet.

Lucian’s hand had stopped moving over the tablet.

Dad was looking at me with a completely different face. Not the worried face exactly. Something more like the face he had when he’d received information that required immediate processing and was doing it very fast.

“Come here,” he said.

Three Timus Pattern

went to him. He crouched down to my height, which he did when he needed to look at me directly.

“Can you describe the man?” he said. “Anything you remember.”

Clau

I told him what I’d seen. The general shape, the cars-gray today, blue on Thursday, I couldn’t remember Tuesday’s exactly. The way he sat. The direction he looked.

Dad listened to all of it without interrupting.

When I finished, he looked at Lucian.

Something happened between them in the way things happened between people who knew each other- not words, just a look that was a conversation.

“Okay,” Dad said to me. “You did the right thing telling me. I’m going to make a call.” He put his hand on my shoulder, the specific weight of it that meant something was serious but I didn’t need to be frightened. “Go wash your hands for lunch.”

“Is it bad?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“I don’t know yet,” he said, which was honest and therefore better than the alternative. “But we’re going to find out.”

I went to wash my hands.

Behind me I heard him say to Lucian, quiet but not quiet enough: “I need to call Cameron.”

Dante POV

I called Cameron from the hallway.

Not in front of Drew, who had gone to wash his hands with the specific obedience of a child who’d been asked to do something and was doing it while also clearly continuing to think about what had been said in the kitchen. I knew that look. Drew processed things in parallel-he did the asked thing while the other thinking kept running in the background, and it would come out later in a question or an observation that was more formed than whatever I’d have expected at the time.

Lucian was still at the kitchen counter. He’d put the tablet down and was watching the doorway to the hallway with the expression he had when he was waiting to understand something before deciding what to do about it.

I stepped further into the hallway, toward the front door, and called Cameron.

He answered on the second ring.

“Dante,” he said, which was how Cameron answered calls from numbers he recognized-name, immediate, no performance of surprise.

“Drew told me something,” I said. “I want to run it by you before I decide what to do with it.”

A pause. “Tell me.”

“He said there’s been a man watching. Three times-twice at school and once at the front of our house

23

Three Times Pattern

Clam

this aftemoon. Always in a car. Different cars each time, Drew noticed the different cars.” I paused. “He didn’t say anything before today because he wasn’t sure enough. But three times is a pattern and Drew knows patterns.”

Cameron was quiet for a moment.

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