Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 212

Chapter 207: The Matt

SEDONA

The sss arrived on a Thursday morning.

I was in the kitchen with my mother, who was making something that involved more pots than the recipe could possibly have required, and I was sitting at the counter with tea I’d been meaning to drink for twenty minutes and a copy of the competition schedule Maria had sent earlier in the week. I’d been going through it the way I went through everything these days-methodically, looking for conflicts, building the picture of what the next few months were going to require from my body and my calendar and my steadily reconstructing sense of what I was capable of.

My phone lit up. A notification from Hendricks and Park.

I put down the schedule.

The sss was from Adaeze Hendricks-my attorney, the senior partner, the woman who had a quality of precision in her written communication that made every sss feel like something that had been weighed before being sent. She did not use exclamation points. She did not use filler phrases. When Adaeze Hendricks sent an sss, it contained exactly what it needed to contain and nothing additional.

*Dear Ms. Preston,*

*I’m writing to inform you that the Cook County Circuit Court has confirmed a hearing date. The initial custody hearing is scheduled for December 23rd. Given the holiday schedule, the court has a compressed docket and this date is fixed. I’d recommend we speak by phone this afternoon to discuss preparation.*

*The jurisdictional question has been resolved in our favor. Illinois retains primary jurisdiction given the original filing location and Nick’s continued residence in the state. This is good news. It means Logan Hayes’s attempts to complicate the filing in Washington have been set aside.*

*Please confirm your availability.*

December 23rd.

I read it twice. Then I put the phone down on the counter and looked at my mother’s back-the precise motion of her at the stove, the rhythm of someone who cooked the way other people breathed, without needing to think about it.

“Mum,” I said.

“Mm.”

“We have a date.”

She turned around. She read my face before I said anything else-my mother had always been able to do this, read the complicated weather of my expression before I’d translated it into language. Her hands stilled.

“When?” she said.

3

< The Mail

“December twenty-third.”

Claim

A moment. Then she put down whatever she was holding and came around the counter and sat on the stool beside me and looked at the sss over my shoulder in silence.

December 23rd. Four weeks away. Christmas break, school holidays, the compressed quiet of a city running down toward the end of the year. Nick would be out of school. Logan would have nowhere to be that was more important than a courtroom.

And I would be in Chicago.

The thought arrived with a complicated weight-not dread exactly, not hope exactly, but something that was both at once, pressing on the same place in my chest from opposite directions. Chicago was the city I had constructed my adult self in. Chicago was the city where I had been diagnosed in a hospital waiting room, alone, with Logan’s calls going to voicemail. Chicago was where Nick lived, where Nick woke up every morning and looked at the glow stars on his ceiling and said goodnight to Gerald the Boot.

Nick.

I was going to be in the same city as Nick.

“I need to call Cameron,” I said.

“Call Cameron,” my mother agreed, and stood up and went back to her pots, and I could see from the set of her shoulders that she was doing the thing she did when she had feelings she was managing- channeling them into the stove, into the work of feeding people, into the only language she had that was big enough.

Cameron answered on the first ring, which meant he’d seen Adaeze’s sss already-she copied him on everything at my request, because Cameron was coordinating the legal logistics and the financial arrangements and approximately four other things simultaneously and it was more efficient than relaying information.

“December twenty-third,” he said, before I could speak.

“You saw it.”

“Just now. I was about to call you.” A pause. “How are you?”

“I’m-” I looked at my mother’s back. At the kitchen light. At the competition schedule still open on the counter beside my phone. “I don’t know yet. I’m processing.”

“That’s reasonable.” He was quiet for a moment-the Cameron quiet, the one where he was already doing four things in his head and would present the organized version shortly. “I’m going to rent a property in Chicago. Something large enough for the family. We’re not staying in hotels for a court case.”

“Cameron-”

“It’s not a discussion, Sedona. Mum and Dad will want to be there. Lucian will come. Probably Rachel and Enzo. We’re not fragmenting everyone across three separate hotels during a custody hearing in December.” A pause. “I’m going to look at properties today. Something with enough bedrooms and a kitchen-Mum will need a kitchen or she’ll spend the entire trip in a state.”

The Mail

Lalmost laughed. He was right about the kitchen

“There’s something else,” I said.

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