Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 243

Chapter 236. The Thing Under Everything.

SEDONA

The table that night was loud in a good way. Lake had not stopped talking about the peregrine falcon since the venue, and he was not going to stop now. He had moved on to describing the exact moment it had dived, which he had apparently witnessed with total clarity despite being seated two levels below the relevant window. Cameron confirmed every detail with the patience of a man who had, in fact, seen the same bird and remembered approximately none of the details Lake was now supplying.

“It was definitely a peregrine,” Lake said. “Drew will confirm this. I am sending him a description tonight.”

“Drew is in London,” my mother said.

“Drew checks his sss,” Lake said, with the confidence of someone who had a system for this.

Rachel was describing, with theatrical precision, the engineering challenge of carrying her sign through the venue’s security checkpoint. Enzo, beside her, said only: “I carried it. That is the entire story. I carried a sign the size of a door.”

“It was not the size of a door.”

“It required two hands.”

“Most signs require two hands.”

“Not most signs.”

Nick was between my mother and me.

He ate with the careful focus of someone encountering a new flavor and deciding, methodically, whether to trust my mother’s stew, the one she’d been making since the Seattle kitchen, the one Lake had approved months ago. Nick took a small bite first. Chewed slowly. Looked at his plate with the consideration of a scientist.

Then he trusted it.

“Can I have more?” he said.

My mother served him more without making it a thing, no comment, no visible emotion, just the plate refilled and set back in front of him with the same efficiency she gave to everyone at the table. But I saw what it cost her to make it look easy. Six years, in some form, of waiting for this exact moment, her grandson at her table, asking for seconds, and she delivered it like it was nothing at all, because making it something would have embarrassed him.

The table continued. Underneath the warmth, I felt nothing wrong. I want to be precise about that, looking back. I had no instinct that night that something was being carried around me. I was tired in the good way, the way a body is tired after it has done something significant and been allowed to rest into the achievement. I ate. I answered Lake’s questions about the match. I watched Nick discover he liked the ginger soup that came after the stew, the one my mother had made specifically because he’d told me on the phone weeks ago that it was the right soup.

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< The Thing Leder Everything

Claim

did not see Dante catch Cameron’s eye across the table. I did not see Cameron give the small nod Tonight. The venue stayed clear, Reeve’s people confirmed it. I did not see Dante look at me, beside Nick, and then look away, the specific weight of a man holding something he had decided not to set down yet.

I found out about all of this later Cameron told me, eventually, in the careful, complete way he told things once he’d decided the moment had arrived. But that night, at the table, I knew none of it.

I just knew Nick was eating my mother’s food and asking for more. Mrs. Peterson came for him at eight. He hugged me at the door, the same fast, full-body hug from the family services office, except this time without the supervised distance. Without the two-hour limit pressing against the edges of it. Logan’s permission for the match had been, I understood even then, a calculated gesture for the benefit of whatever hearing came next. I didn’t care. I held my son in a doorway in Lincoln Park and let the calculation behind it be someone else’s problem.

“GO MUM stays here?” he said, looking back at the cardboard sign propped against the hallway wall.

“It stays here,” I said. “I’m keeping it.”

He nodded, satisfied, and went with Mrs. Peterson into the cold.

The table cleared. People drifted. Lake and Drew’s absence upstairs was filled instead by Lake narrating the evening to no one in particular while he brushed his teeth, Lucian managing him with the patience that had become so familiar to all of us. My parents went to the sitting room. Rachel and Enzo are somewhere with the sign, still debating its dimensions.

I found Cameron in the kitchen.

He was at the counter with a glass of water he wasn’t drinking, and I knew before I said anything that something was sitting underneath his stillness. Eighteen months younger than him, and I had read the specific quality of his quiet my entire life, there was the quiet of him thinking, and the quiet of him deciding what to say, and there was this one, the quiet of him holding something he didn’t want to be holding.

“What,” I said. Not a question.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he told me about the car.

I didn’t react immediately.

I stood in the kitchen of the Lincoln Park house on the night of my first competitive win in eleven years, with Nick’s sign still propped against the wall in the hallway, and I processed it the way I processed everything now, steadily, without the panic that used to arrive first and crowd out the thinking. I looked at the actual shape. The stolen car has no plates. I was found abandoned near the venue. Dante’s run, the timing.

“How long have you known?” I said.

“Two days,” Cameron said.

I nodded once. Slowly.

“After February,” I said. “The hearing. Then we deal with it.”

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The Thing under Everything

Sedona…

Claim

“I know,” I said. “I know what it means.” I looked at the kitchen window, Chicago outside, dark and cold, the

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