Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 225

Chapter 220: The Same Gity

SEDONA

He was close.

That was the first thought. Not a full sentence, Rot a formed thing, just the fact of it, landing before I was fully awake. The ceiling of the Lincoln Park house instead of the Seattle ceiling. December light through unfamiliar curtains. And underneath all of it, the knowledge: he is close.

I had known Nick was in Chicago his entire life. I had known it through phone screens and Mrs. Peterson’s careful logistics and the specific geography of missing someone, the way distance becomes a unit of measurement you carry in your chest without meaning to. Flight duration. Time zones. The number of hours between the moment I wanted to reach him and the moment I could.

This was different.

This was miles. Actual miles, countable, driveable. The same December morning was happening to both of us at the same time in the same city and he was close enough that if I stood at the right window facing the right direction I was facing the same skyline he was.

I lay there with it for a moment. Then I got up.

Breakfast was quiet in the way breakfast was quiet when a room full of people were all choosing not to say the main thing.

My mother made food. She did not ask me how I was. She looked at me once when I sat down, read whatever she found, and went back to the stove.

My father had his newspaper. He was not reading it. His eyes moved across the page with the stillness of someone using the paper as cover while he thought about something else entirely. He did not look up when I sat down. This was also a form of consideration.

I drank my tea. I did not taste it.

The hearing was in three days. Sonia had been precise. No unofficial contact, no approach to Logan’s property, nothing that could be framed as circumventing the legal process. The access arrangement existed through Mrs. Peterson and through the channels they had built carefully over months, and touching anything outside those channels before December twenty-third would hand Logan’s lawyer a gift. I knew this. I had internalized it the way I internalized things I needed to hold without dropping, fully, completely, with no part of my grip left loose.

Knowing the right thing and sitting still inside it were different skills. Nick was close. I could not go to him I sat at the kitchen table in the Lincoln Park house and practiced the distance between those two facts.

Cameron came down at eight forty-three, which was late for him.

He poured his coffee. He sat down across from me. He looked at my face in the way he had been looking at my face since I was born, the Cameron inventory, quick, thorough, filed.

“I have an idea,” he said.

The Same CH-

“Cameron…”

“Hear me out.”

I waited.

Claim

“His school,” he said. “Three-fifteen, closing time. We park on the opposite side of the street and we don’t approach. We don’t call ahead. We don’t go to the gate.” He wrapped both hands around his mug. “You’ve been seeing him in a phone screen for three months. He is an actual child in an actual school with a backpack and friends and a particular way he walks out of a building.” He looked at me. “You don’t have to do anything. You can just see him.”

I looked at the table.

“It’s not contact,” he said. “It’s proximity. We stay in the car. Tinted windows. Nobody knows we’re there.”

“Adaeze…”

“Wouldn’t object to us sitting in a car on a public street,” Cameron said. “I’ve already thought through the legal position. We don’t approach. We don’t make contact. We observe from a distance that any member of the public could occupy.” A pause. “You are allowed to be in the city, Sedona. You are allowed to be on a

street.”

I looked at him.

He looked back with the expression he had when he had already accounted for every objection and was waiting for me to arrive at the same place.

“Okay,” I said.

My mother had been at the stove. I thought she hadn’t been listening. I had misjudged the radius of her attention, which was a mistake I made periodically and should have stopped making.

“I would like to see him,” she said. Without turning around. The specific tone of a statement that was not requesting permission.

My father set down his newspaper on the table. He set it and open, in the middle of a page. Which was not something Parker Preston did. He set things down when he had decided to be elsewhere.

“What time?” he said.

Cameron looked at me and I looked back at him.

“Three-fifteen,” he said.

My father nodded once. Picked up his tea. The question was settled. I had not cried yet this morning. N was not going to cry over my father setting down a newspaper. I looked at the window and blinked once and looked back.

Drew and Lake were at the end of the table. They had been eating with the focused absorption of children who were technically occupied and therefore technically not listening. I had also misjudged this radius.

“I want to come,” Lake said.

The Same CH

Claim

He said it to his toast. Not to any of us specifically, to the table, to the general proposal, as if the wanting were simply information he was entering into the record.

Drew looked up from his plate. “I would also like to come,” he said. With the careful precision of someone distinguishing his wanting from Lake’s wanting, because they were different people with different reasons and Drew thought accuracy mattered.

Cameron looked at them both and again turned and looked at me. His expectations unreadable anyway.

I thought about six people and two children in an SUV on a street outside a Chicago school during December. I thought about the logistics of it, the impracticality, and the number of people who would need to sit still and quiet and simply watch. I thought about Nick at the gate, not knowing.

I thought about my mother seeing her grandson for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon in December. I thought about my father with his newspaper set down in the middle of a page.

“Fine,” I said. “Everyone comes.”

Nobody celebrated this. Lake went back to his toast. Drew made a note in his notebook, which was his version of filing a confirmed plan. My mother turned from the stove with the expression she had when she was organizing a feeling into something useful, already calculating, already thinking about what you wore to see your grandson for the first time even if he couldn’t see you back.

It had not been planned as a convoy but that was what it was. By three-fifteen all of us were at Nick’s

school.

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