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

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Lake & breakdown

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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.

The pasta dishes were still on the table. I stacked them, ran the water, washed them-not because I needed to occupy myself but because it was useful, and because I could hear Lucian’s knock at Lake’s door and his quiet *Lake* and I didn’t want to be standing in the hallway when that conversation happened.

I washed the dishes.

I heard Lucian’s voice, low and steady. I couldn’t make out the words.

Then I heard Lake.

Not words at first. A sound. The specific, unmistakable sound of a child crying..

I set down the dish I was holding.

I stood at the sink and listened to Lake cry in his bedroom, and I understood-with the clarity of

something that had been building for six Tuesdays and had finally arrived at its actual shape-what I was dealing with.

Not a four-year-old who didn’t like me.

A four-year-old who was terrified of what I might do.

Lucian’s voice again-lower, the voice he used when Lake needed to be held rather than explained to. I heard movement. I imagined Lucian sitting on the edge of the bed the way he sat on the edge of things- present, undemanding.

Then Lake’s voice, broken up by the crying but audible now, coming through the flat’s thin walls in fragments:

*-made you cry-*

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Lake’s breakdowA

-don’t like him-*

-he’s like mum-*

I went very still at the kitchen sink.

*-made you cry again-*

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.*

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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.

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