Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 229

Chapter 224. Dante Arrives.

SEDONA

I didn’t go to the airport, to get Dante. But we were making a get-together for his arrival in front of everyone. Maybe we need a kind of confirmation to our parents that we were officially seeing each other, but we haven’t established it yet. We had not done that in front of my parents, and not in a house where Cameron was watching everything. Lake had opinions about everything, and my mother would read my face before I’d finished arranging it.

He had the address. He’d take a car. I knew when he landed because he texted two words: on ground. I put my phone in my pocket and went back to helping my mother with the table and did not check it again for forty minutes, which was a form of discipline I was still practicing.

He arrived at seven-forty. I heard the car first. Then the door. I opened it before he knocked. I had been in the hallway for reasons I wasn’t examining too closely, and there he was with Drew’s small suitcase and his own bag and the specific quality of a person who had been in transit all day and was glad to stop moving.

Our eyes met as we walked through the door. I left a smile on my lips. I heard voices echoing from the kitchen area. Lake’s narration carried from somewhere upstairs, my mother’s specific footstep on the tile. All of it present, all of it close.

“How was the school?” he said. He never bothered to ask how are you, or how’s the case, or any of the things that would have required a careful answer. He was only interested in the school. The thing that had happened today that mattered most.

“He waved with both arms,” I said.

Dante smiled. The real one, unguarded, unperformed, the smile that started at the corner and arrived fully without announcing itself. “Tell me everything.”

Drew had hugged his dad for as long as he wanted to, and after getting everything his dad brought for him when he had to bribe him to come with the family, instead of coming to Chicago with his dad, he hung aroundfor approximately ninety seconds before he disappeared to find Lake to tell him his dad was here.

Lake’s greeting carried from two rooms away, full volume, the announcement of Dante’s arrival to anyone in the building who hadn’t already heard the door.

Cameron came out to the hallway.

The type of handshake he gave Dante had changed over the months. I had watched it happen without marking the exact moment. It had started as professional courtesy. After a while, like the handshake of a man who had assessed someone and found them acceptable. And it had become something with less performance in it. It has become shorter and more direct. It was more familiar and the kind of handshake, families used with each other, not the abrupt kind, used to exchange plesantries

Lucian followed. He and Dante had the ease of men who had found common ground through the children; Drew and Lake had done that work for them, made the introductions months ago without knowing they were making them.

13

Dante Arisa

Clam

My father came last. He shook Dante’s hand, welcoming him for a successful flight as Dante thanked him.

He didn’t say much. My father rarely did, initially. But the handshake was the thing. I knew the handshake to be his trademark.

My mother fed him within ten minutes of arrival. This was not surprising. She put a plate in front of him and watched him eat with the attention she gave to people she had decided were her business, which meant she had already decided.

The children got up at nine. This took longer than it should have because Lake had unfinished reporting to do, and Drew needed to show him something in the bird notebook, and neither of them considered this negotiable. Lucian managed it with the patience of someone who had factored in an extra forty minutes. By nine-thirty, the house had the particular quality of a building where children were theoretically asleep but definitely processing the day in their respective ways.

Dante found me by the glass doors at the back of the sitting room

“Garden?” he asked.

Yes, I answered.

It was December, and it was cold. The garden was dark except for the light coming through the glass and whatever the sky offered, which tonight was not much.

We found what was available, a blanket from the sitting room sofa, another from somewhere Dante located without asking anyone. We sat on the garden chairs, which were the metal kind that held cold, and it was immediately apparent that we had committed to something uncomfortable and were both too committed to acknowledge it.

We talked about the hearing first. Adaeze’s framework, the arguments Logan’s lawyer would make, and the documentation we had. I said the words in the order they needed to be said. And Dante listened without interrupting by asking discouraging questions rather than those that can help.

We talked about the competition. The bracket, the draw, the first match date. He told me something Maria had said about my service that I hadn’t heard yet. She had apparently mentioned it to him in the scheduling call and not to me, which was a thing I was going to raise with her.

At some point, we stopped talking about logistics. I wasn’t sure exactly when. The cold was significant, and we had moved closer without deciding to, and the blanket had been redistributed by unspoken

agreement.

He didn’t push. He never pushed.

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