Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 222

Chapter 217:Settling th

SEDONA POV

Lake had discovered the sitting room. heard him before I saw him-the particular frequency of his running commentary, now directed at the bookshelf. “These books are not organized,” he announced to anyone available. “They are not by color or by size. This is not a system.”

Drew appeared in the doorway of the sitting room with his notebook. He looked at the bookshelf. “They might be organized by something we can’t see yet,” he offered.

Lake considered this for approximately one second. “No,” he said. “There is no system. This is chaos.” He pulled a book out, looked at it, put it back. “I will make a system.”

“Lake,” Lucian said, from the hallway, without looking up from the bag he was moving.

“I am improving the house,” Lake said.

“Leave the books.”

Lake left the books. But he looked at the shelf with the expression of someone filing an intention.

Drew caught my eye from the doorway. He had the expression he got when Lake was being Lake-a mixture of affectionate resignation and mild scientific interest, as if Lake were a weather system worth observing. I smiled at him. He nodded gravely and went back to his notebook.

I had not been in Chicago since Cameron found me hemorrhaging in a hotel room ten months ago.

I had known, intellectually, that returning would be a thing I needed to move through. I had prepared for it the way I prepared for things now-honestly, without dressing it up, acknowledging that the city was going to feel like something and that feeling like something was not the same as being overwhelmed by it.

The skyline looked the same. The sound of the city was the same.

But I was different inside it.

I stood in the front room of the Lincoln Park house while my family organized itself around me and I took

a quiet inventory of the differences. Dr. Mitchell had taught me this. Notice what is different. Name it without judgment. This is information.*

I was standing in Chicago and I was not hiding. That was different.

I had my own name. That was different.

I was not managing anyone’s schedule or labeling anyone’s suits or making lavender cream in a kitchen that didn’t belong to me. I was not waiting for a phone call that wouldn’t come. I was not sitting in a hospital waiting room alone with news too large for the room I was in.

I was standing in a house my brother had rented, surrounded by my family, three days before a hearing

<Settling lo

Claim

that was going to determine the shape of what came next for my son-and I was still standing. This was not nothing. This was, in the careful accounting Dr. Mitchell had encouraged me toward, a significant data point.

I was here on my own terms.

I was still here on my own terms.

My mother appeared from the kitchen with the look of someone who had confirmed the inventory and was ready to deploy. “There’s a good market,” she said. “I’m going now. Your father will come.” She looked at Parker, who was coming back from his perimeter assessment of the garden with the settled expression of a man who had completed his accounting.

“The garden has good soil,” he said, to no one specifically.

“That’s wonderful,” my mother said. “Come to the market.”

He came to the market. I watched them go from the front window.

–

Cameron found me in the sitting room twenty minutes later.

I was on the sofa with Adaeze’s briefing document open again. He came in, looked at the document, looked at me, and sat down in the armchair across.

“The property is good,” he said.

“It is.”

“Kitchen passed inspection.”

“She’s already at the market.”

“I know. Dad texted me from the cereal aisle.” He leaned back. For a moment neither of us said anything. “How are you?”

“I’m-” I looked at the document. “I’m doing the accounting.”

He knew what I meant. “And?”

“I’m different,” I said. “From when I was here before. I’m tracking the differences.”

“Good differences?”

“Yes.” I folded the document. “It’s strange to be in a city and feel like you belong to it differently than you did. Like you’re occupying it from a different position.”

“You are,” he said simply.

“I know.” I looked at the window “Three days.”

“Three days,” he confirmed.

“And Christmas Eve.”

Settling in

Claim

His expression did something-the controlled version of what would have been, in a less managed person, visible emotion. “Christmas Eve,” he said.

“Two hours.”

“Two hours is enough to start,” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked at me the way he looked at me when he was being Cameron the brother rather than Cameron the person who organized things. “You’ve been building toward this for ten months. The hearing, Nick, all of it. You don’t need me to tell you you’re ready.”

“I don’t need you to,” I agreed. “But it’s nice when you do.”

He almost smiled. “You’re ready.”

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