Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 198

Chapter 193: Siblings Teases

Cameron’s POV

I got in the car and started the car.

Lucian had said: *He’ll come around.*

And I believed him. Because Lake was his sonhe received information and worked with it, arrived at conclusions through logic rather than feeling, and logic could be updated when the inputs changed. I simply needed to become a different input so he could update his knowledge on what he knew about me.to something nicer than being polite to the man….monster who took his dad job.

I could not believe that was his impression of me. And I had not bothered to spend time with Lake at all, knowing he existed but did not do the picnic dates with him as Dante was doing and I realized that to love Lucian meant loving Lake and seeing him as mine as well, rather than someone to be managed.

I could do that.

I pulled out onto the road. The city moved past in the quiet, amber-lit way it did late on a weekday evening -streets emptying, November cold pressing against the windows, the particular stillness of a world that had decided to stop for the night.

My phone lit up on the passenger seat.

*Sedona.*

I picked up on speaker.

“You left without saying goodbye,” she said.

“You were being serenaded by Rachel. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“She was not serenading me, she was explaining the sign she’s going to make.”

“The large one.”

“The one Enzo is going to carry.”

“That one, yes.” I took the turn toward the house. “Lake’s asleep. I dropped them home.”

A pause. I could hear her breathing, the particular quality of someone who was about to say something they’d been holding. “How was the car?” she asked.

I kept my voice even. “Educational.”

“He’s four, Cameron.”

“I know.”

“He made a completely logical assessment based on-”

“+know.” I let that sit for a moment. “He’s right that I fired Lucian. He’s right that I haven’t been around him and had not spend anytime with him. I cannot be upset He wished Dante was going to be his second dad. He made a reasonable call.”

Sedona was quiet. Tknew that quiet-it was the quiet she used when she was deciding whether to say the thing she actually thought or the diplomatic version. With me, she usually went with the actual thing.

“You’re going to be weird about this,” she said. “Aren’t you.”

“I’m not going to be weird about it.”

“You have the voice.”

“I don’t have a voice.”

“Cameron. You have a voice. It’s the voice you get when something has gotten to you and you’re deciding how to not let it have gotten to you.”

I said nothing.

“He’s going to come around,” Sedona said. “Lucian’s going to explain it, and Lake is going to have approximately forty-seven follow-up questions, and then he’s going to want to see what a CEO actually does, and you’re going to have to spend an afternoon with a four-year-old who will tell all your employees things you’d rather they didn’t know.”

“He’s going to announce himself.”

“He absolutely is.”

“Lucian said the same thing.”

A moment.

“Good,” Sedona said.

I pulled into the Preston driveway. Cut the engine. The house was mostly dark-living room light still on, the warm amber of it through the curtains.

“Sedona.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you still in the garden?”

“Yes.”

“Go inside. It’s cold.”

“I know it’s cold, Cameron.”

“Then go inside.”

A beat of silence, and then she laughed-just briefly, the laugh’d known my whole life, the one that said *you’re annoying me in a way that I find extremely comfortable* and said she’d see me in the morning, and hung up.

I sat in the car for another minute.

*You’re in it now,* she’d said.

I was. Messily and late and starting from a deficit that a four-year-old had articulated with devastating accuracy. But in it.

I got out of the car and went inside, and the house was warm, and the Japanese maple stood dark and still in the back garden where my sister had kissed the man who had been falling in love with her for fifteen years, and somewhere across the city Lake Park was asleep and dreaming of brothers, and Lucian had said *thank you for taking him seriously*, and I had not yet found the words for what that meant to me

But I was starting to understand the shape of them.

And in the morning, I decided, walking up the stairs in the quiet Preston house, I was going to tell my parents.