Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 238

Chapter 232. The Return

SEDONA

The family services office smelled like carpet cleaner and stale coffee. It was a room designed for no particular person, but it belonged to anyone. I had been sitting in the chair Adaeze had asked me to sit for eleven minutes. I had stayed quietly and had my hands flat on my knees.

Then the door opened. Nick came in slightly ahead of the supervisor, just by half a step. He maintained the gap of a child who walked fast when he knew exactly where he was going and wasn’t going to let an adult’s pace slow him down.

He saw me, and everything slowed. I had been told this happened Dr. Mitchell had a name for it. It is something about the nervous system compressing time around significant input. But I had not understood it until I watched Nick’s face do several things at once in the space of one second. It has been scanned and confirmed.

His face showed it all at once; she was really here, not just a voice on the phone. She looked like his mum. She also looked different from how he remembered. He hadn’t decided yet what to do with any of that. It just showed.

Then he crossed the room. He didn’t run. He walked fast, exactly the same fast walk he’d come in with. And he put his arms around my waist and pressed his face against my body, but he didn’t say anything. I looked at him, and a smile played on my lips.

put my hand on the back of Nick’s head. His hair was longer than it looked in the last photograph Mrs. Peterson had sent. I noted this the way I noted everything now, quietly, as data, a fact I would carry forward.

We stayed like that for a long time. Long enough that the supervisor, a woman with a kind, unobtrusive face, found something to do near the window.

“You’re warmer than I thought,” Nick said finally, into my coat.)

“Warmer?”

“On the phone, you’re just a voice.” He pulled back enough to look at me. “Voices aren’t warm or cold. I didn’t know which you’d be.”

“Warm,” I said.

Nick nodded. Then he sat down in the chair beside mine. He bends toward me. I noticed the excitement in his face, but he seemed to be managing it. I smiled slightly.

“I have something,” he said.

He pulled out his phone. Pressed at it with the focused concentration of a child operating technology he’d been allowed limited access to. He turned the screen toward me. Nick took off the room and the ceiling. He captured everything in the room. The photograph was beautiful.

“That’s Gerald,” he said, pointing. “I wanted you to see him properly. Not just me talking about him.”

112

The Return

Claim

“He’s exactly as I pictured him,” I såld. Which was true, the boot shape, slightly lopsided, made from five stars instead of the four a real boot constellation would have needed, because Nick had insisted on the extra one for the heel.

“I added a star last month,” he said. “For the heel detail. Drew said boots needed a heel or they weren’t

accurate.”

“Drew’s right.”

“I know.” He looked at the photograph himself for a moment, satisfied. Then: “Do you have something to show me?”

I pulled out my own phone. I showed him the photograph I’d taken of his card. The dark blue paper, and the drawing of the two of us with our oversized, round heads. I also showed the orange sun in the corner.

“I took the photo so I’d have it even when I’m not near it,” I said.

He looked at the screen for a long moment.

“You kept it? He asked.

Yeah, I did, as the confirmation of something he’d hoped but hadn’t been sure of.

“Every day since you sent it.”

He was quiet. Then he said, very precisely: “Good.”

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