Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 224

Chapter 219: New Grandparents

LAKE

Everything was looking normal until we walked into the house. My first observation was that the house was way too big. After dropping the bags I checked all the rooms. They were four room and a hallway.

“Dad,” I said.

“Yes.”

“This house is very big.”

“It is,” he said. Two bags, the door, and still watching me, the way he always watched me somewhere new. Quiet attention. The kind that never said stay close but always meant it.

I knew this look. I stayed where he could see me.

The kitchen smell reached me before I found the kitchen. I stopped. Drew had a name for this, a grandmother smell. Warm food from a kitchen where someone had been cooking for years, not just today. Drew’s grandmother’s kitchen smelled like that. He said it was the best smell he knew.

I had never had a grandmother kitchen. My dad’s parents died before I was born, which meant their kitchen smells had also gone before I arrived. My mum’s parents had, I had a word for what they had done. Aunt Lily had given me the word in careful sentences that were really one sentence: They chose not to know you. I had filed this. I had not broken it down yet/ Breaking it down required careful thought, and careful thought required more space than was currently available.

I sat on a sofa in the sitting room. I took time to assess the bookshelf. It was not in good order and I have been thinking on how to fix it, when Cameron’s mum found me.

She didn’t make a production of it. She put her hands behind her back and looked at the bookshelf for a few seconds. Then she turned and smirked. “Are you hungry?”

I was hungry. I’d been hungry since the plane but the food wasn’t good and I’d eaten only the parts worth eating. “Yes,” I said.

“Come,” she said.

She took me to the grandmother-smell kitchen and did not sit me at the table and tell me to wait. She asked me what I liked. I told her. She made it, not something adjacent to what I liked, not an approximation. Exactly what I had said.

While she cooked she talked to me. The questions were real questions. Not the adult performance questions that meant I am showing your father I am interested in his child those had a hollow sound, like something tapped from the inside. These were solid.

“What birds did you see this week?” she asked.

I had not expected this question.

1-3

(NewGrandparents

Claim

“The hadada ibis,” I said. I watched her face for the glaze. Some adults glazed at bird information, eyes open, no longer present. She did not glaze. “It was on the fence by the house in the morning. Very loud. Drew says visitors always complain.”

“Does Drew know a lot about birds?”

“Drew knows everything about birds,” I said. “He has a notebook. He writes the academic names. He said the hadada is bostrychia hagedash, which I can also say.”

“Say it,” she said.

I said it.

She said it back. Correctly, which not everyone managed on the first attempt. “Is that your favorite? The hadada?”

“No,” I said. “The sunbird. Because of the colour.” I thought about this. “But I respect the hadada. It is ridiculous-looking and it knows.”

She made the sound my dad made when I had said something that worked. Not a laugh exactly. The sound underneath a laugh. She put the plate in front of me and sat across the table and watched me eat in a way that should have been uncomfortable but wasn’t, because it was the watching of someone who had decided I mattered and was checking I was alright.

I ate the food. It tasted like the smell.

I decided, between the second and third bite, that she was my grandmother.

I did not say it yet. I sat with it. Big decisions benefited from sitting before being said out loud, I had learned this from my dad, who held things until he was sure, and from Drew, who checked his sources before he committed.

I would check the rest of the data first.

The garden data came from Cameron’s dad.

He found me at the glass doors after lunch, looking at the winter garden. I had been cataloguing the bare plants, difficult without leaves, which was a genuine problem I planned to raise with Drew.

Cameron’s dad stood beside me. He did not crouch to my level the way some adults did, which I found condescending. He just stood.

“The one on the left is a hydrangea,” he said. “Looks dead. It isn’t. In spring it goes blue, very blue, the kind that doesn’t look real.”

I looked at it. It looked entirely dead. “How do you know it isn’t dead?”

“The stems are still flexible. Dead stems go brittle. You can check.”

I checked. He came with me, unhurried, and showed me how to bend a stem slightly – just slightly. It bent. It did not snap.

“Not dead,” I confirmed.

NewGrandparents

“Not dead,” he agreed.

Claim

We went through seven plants. He named each one in the same tone he’d used for the hydrangea, direct, specific, no performance, Drew’s leaf classification system came into my head by the third plant. I described it in full. Cameron’s dad listened all the way through without interrupting, with the attention my dad gave to things worth paying attention to, and asked one question at the end. A real one. I answered it.

When the cold became too much we went inside, I did not say it was too cold because I was managing the cold, and he held the door and I went through and that was the garden data.

Combined with the kitchen data, the conclusion was clear.

I found Cameron in the hallway at four-seventeen.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify