Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 216

Chapter 211: Telling The Truth About Her Past

SEDONA

“There is. And it connects to Chicago, which is one of the reasons I’m telling you together.” I paused. Finding the shape. The honest shape I’d been looking for since yesterday. “Nick, I need to tell you something about me. Something you didn’t know

A pause. “Okay,” he said carefully.

“Before you were born. Before I met your dad, even-when I was young, around your age and then older, I played tennis.”

Silence.

“Competitively,” I said. “I was on the junior circuit. I trained for years, I competed, I was-I was good at it.” I let that land. “And then things happened in my life and I stopped. For a long time. Eleven years.”

Nick was very quiet.

“But recently,” I said, “I started again. I’ve been training here in Seattle. And I’ve been registered to compete. Officially, in the circuit.” Another pause. “I’m going to be competing in Chicago in December. That’s part of why I’ll be there-I have a competition, and I have other things, and they’re both happening in the same place.”

Nothing from the other end. I counted his silence, felt its shape.

“Nick.”

“You play tennis,” he said. Slowly. Like he was building the sentence out of material he didn’t have yesterday.

“Yes,”

“You never told me.”

“No,” I said. “I stopped before you were born. It was–it was a complicated time, and I wasn’t playing anymore, and I didn’t-” I stopped. Tried the honest version. “I didn’t know how to talk about it. Some of it is about things that happened when I was young that I’m still working through.” I paused. “But you’re going to hear about the competition. It’s going to be announced on television in the next few days, with pictures and names, and I wanted you to hear it from me before you saw it somewhere else.”

Another silence.

“Catherine takes me to her tennis,” Nick said.

The statement was so careful, so precisely placed, that I felt it all the way through. He was telling me something with it—not just the fact, but the significance of the fact. Catherine and tennis had become linked in his world. Tennis was Catherine’s thing. And now I was handing him a version of me that lived in the same space.

< Telling The Froth About Het Past

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+know she does,” I said. “She’s a professional player. It makes sense she’d want you to see what she does.

“She taught me how to hold the racket,” he said. Still careful. Still placing each word. “The right grip.”

“Did she?”

“She said I had natural hands for it.” A pause. “What does that mean?”

“It means the way you hold things-the way your hands naturally position themselves-is good for the sport. It’s a real thing. Some people have it and some don’t.” I kept my voice even. “Did you enjoy it? When she took you?”

A long pause.

“I don’t know,” he said, which was Nick’s version of *yes* when he wasn’t sure if admitting it was allowed. “It was-the ball goes fast.”

“It does.”

“And when you hit it right it sounds different.” He said this with the tone of someone reporting a discovery they hadn’t expected to make. “Like a different sound than when you hit it wrong. You can tell by the sound if you did it right.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly right. That’s one of the first things you learn to listen for.”

A silence that was different from the previous silences-something opening in it, something that hadn’t been open before.

“Were you good?” he said. “When you played.”

“Yes,” I said. Simply. “I was good.”

“How good?”

*Junior champion at fifteen. Competitive through the circuit for several seasons.” I paused. “Good enough that people expected me to go further. I didn’t, at the time, because of things that happened. But the ability was there.”

“And now?”

୮

“I’m coming back,” I said. “I’m not who I was at seventeen-I’ve been away too long, my body has been through a lot. But I’ve been training, and I’ve been assessed, and someone who knows the sport believed in me enough to sign me. So I’m in the field. Starting small and building.”

Nick was quiet for a moment. I could hear the faint sound of the street outside his window-Chicago traffic, November, the particular ambient noise of a city that never quite went silent.

“When you come,” he said slowly, “to the Chicago competition.”

“Yes.”

“Will you-can I-” He stopped. Started again. “Catherine’s invitational is in January. Dad said he’d take me.” Another stop. “If I go. To the invitational. Will you be there? In the same place?”

Telling The Frols About Her Past

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thought about the schedule. The competitor list. The dates that overlapped and ran into each other across December and January.

“I’ll be in Chicago for my competition in late December,” I said. “Catherine’s invitational is in January. Whether we’re at the same venue depends on the schedule, which I’m still looking at.” I paused. “But Nick -we’re going to see each other before any of that. That’s the plan. Before Christmas, before any matches.”

“In person,” he said.

“In person.”

Another of those silences with texture. I let it sit.

“Mum,” he said, and something in his voice had shifted-dropped down a register, into the place he went when something had moved through the careful surface.

“Yes.”

“I have the glow stars,” he said. “I still do the constellations.”

“I know, bug.”

“I said goodnight to Gerald the Boot last night.” A pause. “I say goodnight to all of them but Gerald most.”

I closed my eyes. The orange sun on the card. The constellations on a ceiling in Chicago, made-up and named and maintained.

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