Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 209

Chapter 204: Lake’s Breakdown

CAMERON

“You need to put the pasta in now.”

“I was about to.”

“Okay.” He took his water back to the table.

I put the pasta in.

We didn’t speak again until Lucian came into the kitchen twenty minutes later, phone call concluded, as he looked he was ready to get back to cooking. He looked at the pasta on the stove. Looked at Lake with his finished worksheet. Looked at me.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Lake told me when to add the pasta,” I said.

Lucian looked at Lake. Lake looked at his worksheet. A small thing-so small it was barely there-moved

across Lake’s face.

I drove home that fifth Tuesday thinking about the progress i have made with Lake. Before letting my mum throw a dinner for them, i needed Lake to know me and this arrangement had been going for a month now and i noticed things.

Lake was polite. Carefully, precisely polite-the politeness of someone who had made a decision and was holding it with both hands.

But he was in the room.

He was eating the pasta I’d cooked and doing his worksheet at the kitchen table and telling me when the water boiled. He was cataloguing me the way Drew catalogued birds-data points, observed behavior, waiting for enough information to reach a conclusion.

I could work with that.

I had learned patience from Lucian without meaning to, in the way you absorb qualities from people you spend time with. Lucian’s patience was structural, he waited until things got to his favour.. You could only keep showing up and let time do what time did.

I had spent thirty-four years solving things quickly. Cutting through. Finding the structural answer and executing.

Lake was teaching me something different.

The sixth Tuesday, I arrived at the usual time and Lucian opened the door with an expression I hadn’t seen before-worried, but held back. Managed. The expression of someone who had something to tell me but was deciding how.

“He’s in his room,” Lucian, said, quietly.

“What happened?”

“He was-” Lucian paused, “Fine at dinner. We ate. He asked about Drew. And then he was quiet, and I asked if he was alright, and he said yes, and he went to his room.” He looked at me. “He didn’t say goodnight to you.”

“He doesn’t usually.”

“He said it to me twice.” Lucian’s voice was very level. “He was holding something.”

I looked down the hallway. Lake’s door was mostly closed. No light came from under it, which meant either he wasn’t reading or he was in the dark.

“Do you want me to go?” I asked.

Lucian looked at the hallway. Then at me. “No,” he said. “Stay. I’m going to go check on him.”

I sat in the kitchen.

I turned off the tap.

The flat was quiet except for Lake and, underneath Lake, Lucian’s voice doing the steadying thing-not arguing, not correcting, just present. The sound of someone being held while they said the true thing.

*He’s like mum.*

I stood in Lucian’s kitchen with the clean dishes and the dish towel in my hands and I thought about what that meant. Not to me. To Lake.

Lake, who had been born when his mother left. Who had grown up in the specific shape of that absence without knowing the original, without a before to compare the after to. Who had watched his father- careful, patient, steady Lucian-navigate that absence and everything after it alone, and who had somewhere in his four years of observation reached the conclusion that his father cried rarely and that when he did it meant something had truly broken.

Cameron had made him cry.

Therefore Cameron was capable of breaking things.

Therefore Cameron was in the same category as the person who had left.

The logic was complete. The logic was devastating. The logic made every bit of sense if you were four years old and the most important person in your world had come home one evening and gone behind his door and cried, and you had been on the other side of the wall listening, and you had filed it.

I set the dish towel down on the counter.

I had made Lucian cry. I had done that. It had been one day, and I had fixed it, and I had told myself that the fixing mattered-and it did, and I believed that–but Lake had not been there for the fixing. Lake had been there for the crying. Lake had heard his father on the other side of a wall and had filed it under the most frightening category a child who loved someone could imagine: *this person can hurt the person I love most.*

I had been trying to add data points. Jollof chips and puzzle edges and pasta timing and a careful boardroom view.

But Lake wasn’t waiting for me to prove I was good.

He was waiting for proof that I wouldn’t do it again.