Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 227

Chapter 222: The Phone Call at the Gate

SEDONA

My first instinct was to sink lower in the seat and chance a look around but the second won. I was done making myself smaller. I stayed exactly where I was, done shrinking, done taking up less space than I occupied. He couldn’t see through the tinted window. He didn’t know it was me. He was a child who had seen a car and something in him had registered something.

He reached into his bag. Pulled out a tablet. Small, school-issued, the kind with a restricted calling function for approved contacts.

My phone rang.

Nick.

The car went completely silent. Eight people who understood simultaneously what was happening and had collectively decided that nothing in the world was going to move until it had.

I picked up my and fiddled with just for killing for time and maybe give myself time to think.

“Mum?”

Careful and uncertain was the voice he used when he wanted something to be true and wasn’t sure yet if it

was.

“Yes,” I said.

“I though, there’s a car. On the street. And I saw someone through the window and I thought it looked like you but I can’t go close because of stranger danger and Mrs. Peterson says I can’t leave the gate…”

“It’s me,” I said. “That’s our car.”

I reached over and pressed the button. The passenger window came down. December air, cold and immediate.

I turned to face the gate.

I waved.

Forty meters away, Nick Hayes saw my hand.

His whole body stopped. Not movement, the opposite of movement. The absolute stillness of a child whose entire system has halted to receive something. He stood at the gate in his coat and his lopsided backpack and he was completely still.

Then he waved back. Both arms. Big, full, the unself-conscious wave of a child who had stopped caring about anything except the fact that his mother was on the street and he could see her.

He couldn’t come to me. The gateman was at his post, Mrs. Peterson hadn’t arrived, and the protocol was the protocol. Nick knew this, he held the line and waved from inside it and the phone was still live

74

The Phone Catt-At The Gats

between us.

“You’re really there,” he said.

“I’m really here,” I said.

Claim

A sound on his end. Small, wordless. The space before words, belonging to children and to people who have stopped managing what they feel.

“I can see you too,” he said. “Your hand.”

“My hand,” I agreed.

“Can I speak to him?”

My mother. Very quiet, the quietness of someone holding something with great care because she didn’t trust herself any other way.

I turned.

Her eyes were bright. Not spilling, held, precisely, by a woman who had been waiting six years and was not going to let it happen clumsily.

My father was beside her, looking at Nick through the windscreen. Cameron would find the word for his expression later. A man seeing something he’s been owed for a long time. Right. Exactly right. I didn’t have it yet. I just had my father’s face and forty meters and the phone in my hand.

“Nick,” I said. “I want you to meet some people. Is that okay?”

The considering beat. “Who?”

“Your grandparents,” I said. “My mum and dad.”

The receiving silence, the same one he’d had when I told him I was coming, when I told him about the tennis.

“Okay,” he said. Quietly.

I held the phone out. My mother took it in both hands, not one, both, the way you held something you were afraid of dropping. My father leaned in.

ľ

Nick was still at the gate.

Standing very straight, phone to his ear, listening to my mother’s voice for the first time. Jennifer Preston, who had counted him in a list of grandchildren in a Seattle kitchen without being asked. He didn’t know about the counting yet. He would, eventually.

My father leaned in and said something short. Nick’s chin came up, the way it did when he’d received something that mattered and was deciding how to carry it.

From the backseat, Lake said: “He is waving very hard.”

Nick had one arm up again, sustained, steady, directed at the backseat window where Lake’s face was against the glass.

2.4

< The Phone Cett At The Gate

“He really is,” Drew said.

Cham

My mother lowered the phone. She held it out without speaking. Her face had done the thing it did when she’d finished managing a feeling and was now simply inside it.

“Nick,” I said.

“Mum.” The lower register. Something had moved through the surface. “She sounds like you.”

“People say that.”

“She said she’s been waiting to meet me.”

“She has,” I said. “We all have.”

A pause. “The old man too?”

I pressed my lips together. “He’s not that old.”

“He sounded old,” Nick said, with the authority of a fair assessment. “But nice old. Like a teacher who knows things.”

Behind me my father made a sound. His hearing was inconveniently excellent.

“I’ll tell him you said that,” I said.

“Okay.” A pause. “Mum. Mrs. Peterson just pulled up.”

I looked. The familiar car sliding into the pickup lane. The ordinary machinery of a Tuesday afternoon, indifferent to what had just happened inside it.

“Go,” I said.

“Christmas Eve,” he said.

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