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.

(Processing His Feelings

Claim

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?”

Drew looked up from the leaf. “Cameron Preston?”

“Yes.”

Drew’s expression shifted. He had a very organized face-not blank, but careful, like all the feelings were arranged neatly before any of them came out. “I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I,” I said. “Until last night.”

“Are you upset?”

“Yes.”

Drew considered this. “Because you thought it was my dad?”

“Because I thought it was your dad and I liked it,” I said. “I liked the idea. We were going to be brothers. We told everyone at school.”

Drew’s expression did something complicated. He put the leaf down on the bench between us. “I know.”

“I didn’t mean to get it wrong.”

“I know. You were working with what you had.”

This was a thing Sedona had said once, I realized. *Working with what you had.* Drew had picked it up and kept it, which was also very Drew-he collected words and phrases the way he collected leaf specimens, pressed them carefully somewhere inside himself and used them later when they fit.

“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.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify