Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 200

Chapter 195: Processing His Feelings

Lake’s POV

Drew was already in the yard.

This was how it usually worked now. Drew was always there before me-not because he arrived earlier, but because Drew moved very quietly through spaces and was usually already settled in a spot before anyone noticed. He’d be standing by the fence looking at something, or sitting on the bench with his bag on his lap, very still, like he was waiting for information that the world hadn’t sent yet.

Today he was looking at a leaf. An actual leaf, from the tree by the east fence, turning it over in his hands with the expression he got when he was studying something..

I ran over.

“Drew.”

He looked up. “Lake.”

“Did you know,” I said, sitting down next to him on the bench without being invited because we were friends now and friends did that, “that my dad is not seeing Dante?”

Drew looked at the leaf. Then at me. “I know. Sedona told me last night when we were leaving.”

“She told you?”

“I asked.” He turned the leaf over again. “I noticed something in the garden. I wasn’t sure then you guys came out, and we had to leave so I asked her again at the car just to be sure.”

This was very Drew. He noticed things and asked about them instead of just guessing. I usually just guessed. These were different methods and sometimes mine was faster and sometimes his was more

accurate.

“So you know about Sedona and your dad?” I said.

“Yes.” He said it the way he said most things-calm, no extra weight on it. “I didn’t know before the garden. I thought it was strange when Sedona came to the facility so much, but my dad visits a lot of people for tennis so I thought it was that.”

“Were you surprised?”

Drew thought about this with the focus he brought to things that deserved it. “A little,” he said. “But I also- when I think about it now, it makes sense. He brought her soup for a long time. He doesn’t bring most people soup.”

“What kind of soup?”

“Ginger. He makes it from his grandmother’s recipe.”

“Oh.” I thought about this. Soup felt serious. My dad made soup when I was sick, which was a care activity.

Dante making soup for Sedona on purpose, multiple times, while she was in the hospital-that was a lot of soup. “Did you know my dad is seeing Cameron?”

“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t understand why my dad is seeing Cameron when Cameron is-” I tried to find the right word. My dad was always saying to find the right word instead of just using a big feeling as the whole word. “Cameron is not good,” I said. “He made my dad cry.”

Drew looked at me. “When?”

“When he took his job. My dad came home and I could hear him, through the wall. He thought I was asleep but I wasn’t asleep.” I looked at my hands in my lap. They were cold, the way they always were. “He cried for a long time. And then he stopped and I heard him get up and go to the kitchen and make tea, and then he went to bed. And in the morning he pretended he hadn’t. But I heard.”

Drew was quiet for a moment.

“He does that,” I said. “He pretends things are okay so I don’t worry. He’s been doing it since my mum left.” I stopped. I didn’t usually talk about my mum at school. It felt like a private thing, a thing that lived in my house and not out here. But Drew was different from school people. Drew was the kind of person who heard things and didn’t do anything bad with them. “She left when I was some months old,” I said. “So I don’t remember her. But my dad-he didn’t cry about that, not where I could hear. He just started doing everything himself, and sometimes Aunt Lily came, and he just kept going.” I looked at the leaf on the bench. “So when he cried about Cameron, it meant it was really bad. Because he doesn’t cry about things unless they’re really bad.”

Drew said nothing for a moment. Then: “My mum is gone too.”

“Do you miss her?”

He thought about this the way he thought about everything-like the answer deserved to be right. “Sometimes I miss the idea of it,” he said. “Like, I see kids with their mums and I think it would be different. But my dad is there all the time, so mostly it’s just-normal. Our kind of normal.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Same.”

We sat for a moment. The yard was filling up around us-kids arriving, bags dropping, someone starting an argument near the climbing frame. Drew watched it all from the bench with his patient, cataloguing expression. I watched too, but differently. I watched it the way I watched everything-looking for things that were happening that hadn’t been announced yet.

“Cameron made my dad cry,” I said again, because I needed Drew to understand the weight of this. “That means he’s a bully. Bullies take things from people because they can. Cameron took my dad’s job because he could. He’s the boss. He could do whatever he wanted and so he did it and my dad went home and cried and then got up and made tea and pretended.”