Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 196

Chapter 191: Trying To Make Amends

Cameron’s POV

I exhaled through my nose. Quietly.

“And he has no children.” Another piece of the case against me. *Where would I get a sibling from? I like Drew. Drew is my friend. Dante is good. I don’t know anything about your boss. I don’t like him.”

Lucian said something too quiet for me to catch. Explaining, probably. Finding words to explain how it didn’t work like he assumed but that didn’t mean the current situation was worse.

Lake did not say anything else. A few minutes later, when I checked the mirror at a red light, he was asleep against the door-the abrupt, total sleep of very young children, present one moment and gone the next.

The rest of the drive was quiet.

Lucian’s building was a clean mid-rise in a decent neighborhood. I’d been here once before, the day I’d come to his door with no real plan and met Lily and Lake and had the beginning of a conversation that changed things. I remembered, the way Lily had looked at me with an expression that was not quite suspicion and not quite welcome.

I pulled up to the front. Lucian had Lake in his arms before I’d fully stopped-Lake limp and entirely unconscious, one arm hanging, his face slack with the specific peace of a sleeping child.

I got out. Held the door.

“He’s heavier than he looks,” Lucian said.

“He had two pieces of cake.”

“He had two and a half. I got there on the half.”

I held the building door. Lucian carried Lake through it, and I followed them to the elevator, and we rode up in silence with Lake’s face pressed against Lucian’s shoulder and his small hand cufled against Lucian’s

collar.

Lucian’s door was unlocked-Lily had a key, and the light was on inside, which meant she’d been in and out tonight. He carried Lake to his room and I waited in the hallway, looking at nothing in particular, aware that I was in a space that wasn’t mine and that the evening had deposited me here with a set of feelings I hadn’t fully processed yet.

The feeling I kept returning to was not quite hurt. Lake was four. Lake had built a rational structure out of available materials and reached a wrong answer, which was not a moral failing, it was just the math of what he’d been able to see. I understood this clearly in the part of my mind that managed things clearly.

The other part was less organized.

Not like Dante.

7 3

Trying to Make Amends

Claim

was aware that Dante Wells was good-looking in the obvious way. He was warm in the natural, unguarded way of someone who had never needed to construct warmth as a professional skill. He had a son. He played tennis. He had spent months being precisely and consistently present for Sedona in a way that everyone in the garden tonight could see and feel.

I was not those things. Or I hadn’t been, or I’d been them in different configurations, or they were there and not visible from where Lake was standing.

*He has no children. Where would I get a sibling from?*

I stood in Lucian’s hallway and looked at a framed photograph on the wall-Lake at what appeared to be a beach, maybe two years old, holding a very large piece of watermelon and looking at the camera with total seriousness-and felt the specific quality of wanting something to be different without knowing yet how to make it different.

Lucian came back out and pulled Lake’s door mostly closed..

He looked at me.

“He was asleep before we stopped,” I said.

“He does that.” Lucian’s voice was neutral, careful. Feeling out the room. “How much did you hear?”

I considered pretending. Decided against it. “Most of it.”

Lucian closed his eyes briefly. “Cameron-”

“He’s not wrong about the job,” I said. “I did that. That part is accurate.”

“You reinstated me the next morning.”

“After I’d already done it.”

Lucian looked at me for a moment. The look he had when he was deciding how honest to be-a calculation I recognized because I’d seen it across a desk for eighteen months before I finally understood what was actually happening when he did it. “He’s four,” he said. “He built a story with what he had. It made sense from where he was standing.”

“The logic was sound,” I agreed. “Given his data set.”

A pause. Then Lucian said, quieter: “He’ll come around. I’ll talk to him.”

“Don’t make it too hard,” I said. And then, because I’d been thinking it since the car: “He can come around whenever he feels like it. On his own timeline. I’m not-” I stopped. Found the better version of what I was trying to say. “I don’t need him to be convinced. I’d rather he got there himself.”

Lucian was looking at me with an expression I was still learning to read-something that moved through its own quiet register. “You took it to heart,” he said. Not accusing. Just noticing.

“He’s your son.”

“He’s four.”

“Both things can be true.”

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