Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 219

Chapter 214: Anticipating Logan’s Retaliation

SEDONA

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I thought about him in his office. The corner one, forty-second floor, the view of the Chicago skyline I had looked at from the doorway a hundred times and never entered because it was Logan’s space in the way that most of the apartment had been Logan’s space and I had moved through it carefully, maintaining it, making it function, occupying it without claiming any of it.

I thought about him looking at my photograph.

Not the woman he’d left on read while she sat in a hospital waiting room. Not the woman who had labeled his suits and made lavender cream and labeled herself, over three years, in increasingly smaller letters. The photograph was of someone on a court, mid-motion, belonging to a sport that had existed before him and was continuing after.

Nine minutes was a long time to look at something.

I called Cameron.

He picked up immediately. “I assumed you’d seen it.”

“Two phone calls,” I said. “Do we know yet?”

“Reeve is working on it. The numbers aren’t in yet-he flagged the behavior and is following the thread.” A pause. “Could be his lawyer. Could be Sherry. Could be Catherine.”

“Okay.”

“Sedona.” His voice shifted-the brother register, not the strategy one. “You expected this.”

“I did.”

“He doesn’t have a move here that changes anything. The hearing date is set. The documentation is solid. Him seeing your photograph doesn’t alter the legal position.”

“I know,” I said. “I know all of that.” I looked at the garden again. “It’s just-he saw me. After all of this. He

saw me on a court with my name and he sat there for nine minutes and I don’t know what he decided in those nine minutes.”

A pause.

“He decided that the woman he underestimated is more present than he thought,” Cameron said. “That’s all. And that’s good for us.”

I pressed my free hand flat on the counter. “Yes,” I said. “You’re right.”

“I usually am,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“Sorry.” He wasn’t sorry. “I’ll call when Reeve has the numbers on those calls. In the meantime-are you

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Anticipating Logen’s Retaliation

alright?”

“Yes, I said. And I was. The feeling was real and I was holding it and it was not going to move me. “I’m alright.”

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The rest of the morning was quieter than I expected.

More commentary online. More people remembering. Joelle Ferreira’s post kept accumulating responses. Someone had found archival footage-a junior tournament from when I was sixteen, a quarterfinal match that had apparently been stored in some circuit archive and was now circulating because the internet found these things once it had a reason to look.

I didn’t watch it.

I went to the facility in the afternoon and trained for two hours and let my body do the work that my mind had been doing all morning. Dante was there but we didn’t talk about the announcement-he’d texted in the morning, two words: *it’s real,* and I’d replied: *it is,* and that had been enough. On the court, I played a set against one of the junior players he coached, a seventeen-year-old with a serve that was still finding itself but a backhand that was already something. I lost the first three games, adjusted, won the next four.

I drove home in the late afternoon with my hands steady on the wheel and the low November light coming through the windscreen at an angle that made the city look briefly like something else-briefly, for just a few seconds, like Chicago. The flat grey light of December coming. I blinked and it was Port Harcourt and Seattle and the road I knew.

Mrs. Peterson’s number came through at six forty-one.

I picked up expecting her voice. Instead, after a small fumbling sound, I heard breathing-the particular breathing of someone small who was working up to something.

Then Nick’s voice.

Small. Slightly awed in the specific way of a child who has discovered something about someone they know and has not yet decided what to do with it.

*I looked you up,* he said. *There’s a video of you playing. From when you were young.”

A pause.

*You were really fast.*

The voice note was eleven seconds long.

I listened to it four times.

The first time I was just receiving it-the eleven seconds, his voice, the *really fast* at the end with the particular emphasis of someone who had watched something and been surprised by it.

The second time I listened for what was underneath the words asi thought of what video he managed to dig up from my past. # Me at sixteen, on a hard court, moving the way I had moved then-before eleven

< Anticipating Logan’s Retalration

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years and a marriage and a diagnosis and a recovery, before everything that had happened to my body and my life. Fast. Accurate. Someone who knew where the ball was going before it got there.

The third time I noticed the pause before *you were really fast.* A beat-longer than necessary, longer than six-year-olds usually left when they were thinking of what to say and wondering if saying it was a good idea. As if he’d had something else to say before it and had decided not to.

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