Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 221

Chapter 216: Finally in Chicago

SEDONA POV

The flight was two hours and forty minutes.

I spent the first hour looking out the window at nothing in particular-cloud cover, the flat grey of high altitude, the particular absence of geography that long flights offered. My mother was beside me with a travel pillow she’d had since approximately 1997 and had never replaced because it worked and she saw no reason to retire functional things. My father was across the aisle reading something. Cameron was two rows back, already on his laptop, the blue light of it visible in my peripheral vision every time I turned my head.

Lucian had Lake in the row behind them. I could hear Lake at intervals-not misbehaving, just existing at his natural volume, which was higher than airplane convention generally preferred. Lucian’s voice underneath it, patient, redirecting. Drew was beside me in the window seat, which he had requested with the quiet certainty he brought to preferences, and he had spent the first forty minutes cataloguing cloud formations in his notebook with the focus of someone doing important field work.

I watched him write and thought about Nick.

Nick, who was in this city. Nick, who knew I was coming and was holding that knowledge in the careful way he held things-not telling Logan, not telling Catherine, keeping it in the same internal drawer where he kept the phone calls and the card he’d sent and the glow star constellations on his ceiling.

I was going to see him. That was real. Adaeze had confirmed the access arrangement two days ago- Christmas Eve, two hours, at a neutral location, supervised by Mrs. Peterson rather than Logan because Logan had refused to be present at any arranged meeting and Mrs. Peterson had offered herself as the responsible adult and Adaeze had made it work. Two hours. Christmas Eve. Four days away.

I looked back out the window.

The second hour I slept, or something adjacent to sleep-the shallow, surface version that travel produced, more rest than unconsciousness. The third I spent reading through Adaeze’s most recent briefing document, which I had already read twice but which benefited from a third pass because it was detailed and the details mattered and I was the kind of person who needed to have things in my hands when I was uncertain rather than letting them exist only in my head.

The hearing was in three days. December twenty-third. Cook County Circuit Court, nine AM.

I folded the document and put it back in my bag and watched Chicago appear below us through the cloud —the grid of it first, then the lake, then the skyline coming out of the grey morning like something surfacing.

I had not been here since Cameron found me in that hotel room.

I had known this was coming and I had thought I was prepared for it and now, watching the city appear below me, I understood that prepared and ready were not the same thing.

<Finally In Cheage

Cameron had not understated the property..

Claim

Lincoln Park, a Georgian house on a tree-lined street, six bedrooms and a kitchen that was visible from the entrance hall and was the first thing my mother saw when she came through the door. She walked through the kitchen once-a full circuit, touching nothing, just looking-and then she set her bags down in the doorway, opened her handbag, and took out the small notebook she kept for exactly this kind of occasion.

“There’s a market two streets over,” she said. “I saw it from the car.”

“Mum,” Cameron said, behind her, managing two bags and his laptop case. “We’ve been inside for forty seconds.”

“I need to know what they have.” She was already writing. “The oven looks good. Gas. I prefer gas.” She looked at my father. “Parker, there’s a garden.”

My father had come through the front door last, the way he always did when entering an unfamiliar space -letting everyone else settle before he established his own position. He looked at the kitchen. Then through the glass doors at the garden beyond. “I see it,” he said.

“It has a tree.”

“I see that too.”

He went to the glass doors and looked out at the garden with the quiet assessment he gave to spaces he needed to understand before he could rest in them. The tree was an oak-old, bare, its branches making a deliberate pattern against the grey December sky. He stood there for a moment doing his accounting of the space, and then he nodded slightly at nothing in particular and turned back to the room.

“It’ll do,” he said..

This was my father’s highest available rating for anything he had not personally built or planted.

The house was over-furnished in the way of rental properties that were trying to demonstrate their own quality-too many throw pillows, art that had been chosen to offend no one and therefore said nothing, a bookshelf in the sitting room that contained an eclectic and clearly decorative arrangement of volumes that I doubted anyone had read. But the bones of the place were good. The ceilings were high, the rooms were large, the kitchen was real rather than performative, and there was a sitting room/with a fireplace that my mother assessed and declared functional within five minutes of arrival.

Lucian directed the bags.

He did it the way he did most logistical things-without announcement, without making it a visible effort, simply moving through the space and organizing it until it was organized. My father watched him from the hallway for a moment-the particular attention my father paid to people who were competent, which was the closest he got to admiration on short acquaintance. Then he said, quietly, to my mother who was beside him: “He seems capable.”

My mother looked at Lucian. Then at Cameron, who was on his phone across the room and had not heard. Then back at my father. “Very,” she said, with a warmth that was specifically calibrated for my father’s ears and no one else’s.

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