Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 207

Chapter 202: Playdates

CAMERON

Lake was in the living room when we arrived, on the floor with what appeared to be every single piece of a large puzzle spread across the carpet in deliberate, organized rows. He looked up when we came in. Looked at Drew first-his face doing the immediate open thing it did for Drew, the uncomplicated warmth.

Then he looked at me.

“Hello,” he said. Polite. Precise. The exact register of someone who had been raised well and was deploying that raising as a form of controlled distance.

“Hello, Lake,” I said.

He looked at the puzzle. “Drew, do you want to help? I’m sorting the edge pieces.”

Drew sat down on the carpet with the focused willingness he brought to most things. I set my bag by the door and went to find Lucian in the kitchen.

He was at the stove, back to me, and he turned when I came in with the expression he had when something was going better than expected. He tilted his head toward the living room-*they’re both there?*

I nodded.

He turned back to the stove.

I sat at the kitchen table and we existed in the same space in the easy way we were learning-the companionable quiet of two people who didn’t need to fill every moment. From the living room, Lake’s voice carried: *these are all sky pieces, they go here, the rule is you don’t mix sections-* and Drew’s quieter response, and then Lake again, narrating the sorting system with the thoroughness of someone who had opinions about puzzle methodology.

“He looked at me,” I said, quietly.

“He saw you,” Lucian said.

“He said hello.”

“He has manners.” Lucian stirred something. “It’s more than last week.”

Last week had been the first Tuesday, which had gone approximately as follows: Lake acknowledged my presence, spoke to Drew, ate dinner in the conversational orbit of everyone except me, and went to his room at seven-thirty without saying goodnight. He hadn’t been rude. He had been the opposite of rude- VERY polite, carefully neutral, the politeness of someone who had decided that they were going to withhold rather than attack.

I kept showing up. Each Tuesday, and sometimes a Thursday when Dante needed Drew picked up from the facility again, or a Saturday afternoon when the group gathered at the Prestons’ and Lake came too. I brought the jollof chips on the second Tuesday. Lake looked at the bag on the kitchen counter and then at me and then at the bag again, and said nothing, but later I noticed the bag had been moved closer to where he was sitting and approximately half of it was gone.

I filed this.

I didn’t make anything of it.

I had learned, watching Lucian with Lake, that the worst thing you could do with a child who was assessing you was to signal that you’d noticed the assessment. It created pressure. What workedwas simply to continue being what you were, without requiring the child to confirm your value on any particular schedule.

I was trying to do that.

I asked Lake questions when they came naturally and didn’t force them when they didn’t. I sat on the floor for the second puzzle, which was a birds-of-the-world puzzle that Drew had contributed and which Lake had strong opinions about. I learned that Lake thought pelicans were ridiculous-looking and should be respected for it, and that his favorite was the sunbird because of the color, and that he thought the bird classifications on the puzzle were wrong because Drew had told him the academic names and the puzzle had used common names and Lake considered this sloppy.

He had not been talking to me when he said any of this. He had been talking to Drew, adjacent to me, and had listened without inserting myself, and at the end he had looked at the section of puzzle I’d completed and said, neutrally: *you did the water birds correctly.*

It was four words. I did not let on that I was holding them like currency.