Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 210

Chapter 205: Being Consistent

CAMERON

Those were different things. Completely different. And no amount of Tuesdays would close that gap unless Lake understood-actually understood, with the full information, not the assembled pieces-what had happened and what I’d done about it and what I intended going forward.

I couldn’t be the one to tell him. That wasn’t my conversation to have. It was Lucian’s, and Lucian was in there having it, and I needed to trust that.

But I sat at the table and I understood, finally, the actual shape of what I was asking Lake to do.

I was asking him to trust that I was different from the person who left.

And the only way to show him that was the one thing the person who left had never done.

Stay.

Just keep staying. Keep coming on Tuesdays and stirring Lucian’s stew and letting Lake tell me the water was boiling and not making it a declaration or a performance or a thing that required acknowledgment. Just stay, steadily, with no conditions on whether Lake decided I was worth staying for, until *Cameron comes on Tuesdays* became as unremarkable and reliable as the nightlight that put stars on his ceiling.

That was it. There was no other version of it.

I sat at the kitchen table for a long time. The crying from down the hall quieted slowly, the way it does- not stopping suddenly but running out, the way a tide runs out, until there was only Lucian’s voice and then that too went quiet and there was just the hum of the building and the buzz of the hallway light.

Lucian appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked at me. He looked at the washed dishes. He sat down. across from me.

We were quiet together for a moment.

“He heard me,” Lucian said. “That night. I thought he was asleep.”

“I know.”

“He’s been carrying it since then.” Lucian’s voice was level, but it had the quality of something that had been processed very recently and was still warm from it. “He didn’t tell me. He just-kept it.”

“He’s your son,” I said.

Lucian looked at me.

“He carries things quietly,” I said. “He files them and carries them and doesn’t show you because he doesn’t want you to worry.” I paused. “That’s what you do.”

Lucian was very still for a moment. “Cameron-”

“I’m not-” I stopped. Found the right version. “I’m not saying it as a criticism. I’m saying it because I see it.

He learned it from watching you do it, and it’s the same quality that makes him fair-he doesn’t react, he holds things until he has the full picture.” I looked at the table. “He just doesn’t have the full picture yet.”

“I told him,” Lucian said “What happened. What you did. That you came to the door.”

“I know.”

“He listened.” Lucian was quiet for a moment. “He’s tired now. He cried for a while.” A pause. “He asked me if I was happy.”

I looked up.

“I told him yes,” Lucian said. Simply. Without decoration.

We sat in the kitchen. The flat was quiet. Down the hall, Lake was probably asleep-the deep, abrupt sleep that followed real crying, the reset sleep.

“I’m going to keep coming,” I said.

“I know,” Lucian said.

“No change to the Tuesdays.”

“I know.”

“He doesn’t have to like me yet. He can take as long as he needs.” I looked at the clean dishes on the drying rack. “But I’m going to be here. Every week. Until *here* is just what it is.”

“He’ll pretend not to.”

“I know that too.”

Lucian looked at me for a long moment. The full-register look, the underneath one. “Cameron,” he said.

“Lucian.”

“He’s going to come around.”

“I know,” I said. And then, because it was true and because the evening had earned it: “I know, because he’s yours. And you always come around to the right thing. Eventually.”

Lucian made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite not one.

I kissed him once, in the doorway, and went to check on Lake.

Lake’s room was small and organized in the particular way of a child who had a system-not tidy in the adult sense, but everything had a place it was returning to between uses. The bird drawings on the wall, the new ones on the thick paper I’d brought, pinned carefully beside the older ones on thinner stock. A shelf with books arranged by size. The star nightlight plugged into the socket by the bed, currently off in the daylight.

Lake was sitting on his bed with his knees pulled up, his face in the aftermath of crying-the slightly swollen look around his eyes, the stillness of someone who has stopped but is still close to the edge of it.

I didn’t take the desk chair. I sat on the floor, back against the wall, below his eyeline. Lower than him.

He looked at me from above. Calculating.

“Your dad told me you heard him,” I said. “When he came home.”

Lake said nothing.

“You heard through the wall,” I said.

Lake’s chin moved. A small movement-not a nod, but something adjacent to it. Confirmation.