Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 244

Chapter 237: The Other Court.

SEDONA

Maria had found the facility on two days notice, which meant it wasn’t ideal.

Smaller than the one in Seattle. Fewer entrances to monitor Cameron had mentioned it exactly once, in the flat unbothered tone he used when he’d already solved the problem and didn’t want me carrying it. “Reeve’s people will be on-site,” he’d said. “You won’t see them. Train like you would anywhere.”

I trained like I would anywhere.

The morning was good. My serve had the specific clean quality I’d been chasing since the match, the placement landing where I aimed it more often than not, the legs recovering faster than they had three days ago. I was forty minutes into a session with one of Maria’s hitting partners, working the cross-court angle that had given me trouble in the second set against Preet, when I heard the second court’s gate

open.

I didn’t look up immediately. You learned not to, at this level, a flinch toward every new sound cost you rhythm.

Then I heard the voice.

“Sedona Preston,” Catherine Voss said. “I didn’t realize you were using this facility.”

I finished the point before I turned around.

This was deliberate. Not rudeness, discipline. The ball had been in play and I was not going to let Catherine Voss’s arrival pull my attention off a live rally, regardless of what the arrival meant or how clean the timing was.

It was too clean to be coincidence. A private facility, two days’ notice, the only viable option before the competition, and Catherine Voss had simply happened to book the adjacent court for her own pre-invitational practice at the same hour. I filed this the way filed everything now. Not panic. Information.

I turned around once the point had ended.

“Catherine,” I said.

ľ

She was already on her own court, racket bag set down with the careful unhurried movement of someone who had nowhere urgent to be. Dark warm-up gear, the kind with a logo I recognized from her sponsorship deal. She looked exactly like her photographs, composed, athletic, the specific polish of someone who had spent a career being watched and had made peace with it.

“I’d heard you were back in the city,” she said. Friendly. The performative register I recognized immediately, three years of marriage-adjacent proximity having taught me its exact temperature. “Good match the other night. I caught the highlights.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The Other Lun-1.

went back to my session.

She didn’t go back to hers. Not immediately.

CHIM

She stood near the divider between the two courts, adjusting something on her racket that didn’t need adjusting, and the small talk continued in the gaps between my points, the specific rhythm of someone who understood exactly how to insert herself into a conversation without appearing to insist on one.

“Nick’s grip has gotten so much better,” she said, at the changeover. “His backhand especially. I worked with him on that, the low hand position, the way you anchor the wrist.” A small, warm laugh. “He’s a natural. Picks things up fast.”

I bounced the ball twice before my next serve. Didn’t answer,

“It’s nice for him,” she went on, when the silence didn’t fill itself the way she’d apparently expected. “Having two tennis players in his life now. Most kids don’t get that, usually it’s one parent who’s into it and the other who tolerates it from the sidelines. He’s lucky.”

I served. The ball caught the corner of the box, clean, the kind of serve that didn’t need commentary.

“He is lucky,” I said. Even. Pleasant. “He has people who pay attention to him.”

A small pause from her side of the divider.

“I just think it’s generous of you. Not to make it complicated. Some women would.”

I looked at her steadily for a few minutes.

“There’s nothing complicated about it. He’s my son.”

I went back to my session.

I had learned, across seven months and a court in Seattle and a hundred small situations that used to dismantle me, the specific discipline of not rising. Catherine’s comments were not random. Each one had a target underneath the warmth – the grip lesson establishing her claim on a piece of Nick’s development, the natural for him to have two tennis players line drawing a quiet equivalence between us that wasn’t actually equivalent, the generous of you not to make it complicated both complimenting and warning in the same breath, the kind of sentence designed to make me feel watched for any sign of territorial behavior I hadn’t actually displayed.

Comments

LUCK DRAW >

Vote