Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 245

The Other Court-2

I didn’t rise to any of tt.

But I clocked every word. Fied it the way Adaeze had taught me to file things, not for today, for later, for the version of this conversation that might matter in February if Catherine’s name came up in any context relevant to the hearing.

She stayed another twenty minutes, working through her own drills on the next court over. Every so often a comment floated across the divider – same careful warmth as always. I answered what needed answering and let the rest go.

When my session ended, I packed my bag slowly. No rush.

I didn’t look back at her court on my way out.

What I didn’t see – what I learned about only because one of Maria’s assistants mentioned it in passing the next day, the kind of detail that arrives sideways and lands harder for it was Catherine, after I’d gone, standing at the edge of her own court and watching my hitting partner run through a few final serves alone, the ones I’d left mid-drill.

She wasn’t watching the hitting partner.

She was watching the marks my serves had left in the clay – the placement, the pattern, the specific evidence of a player who had been gone eleven years and had come back hitting lines like she’d never left.

The assistant said Catherine stood there for a long moment.

Then she packed up and left without finishing her own session.

I didn’t know any of this when I got back to the Lincoln Park house that afternoon. I told Cameron about the conversation in the kitchen. The dry version. The facts without the undertone. I had already decided that was how I was going to carry it, as information, not as a wound.

“She mentioned the grip,” I said. “Said she taught him.”

Cameron looked up from his laptop. “Did she.”

“And that it was generous of me not to make things complicated.” I poured water. Didn’t sit down yet. “She was testing something. I don’t know what.”

Cameron was quiet for a moment, the specific quiet of him filing something for later use.

“She was testing whether you’d react,” he said. “Whether you’re still the woman who used to flinch when someone implied she was being unreasonable.” He closed the laptop. “You didn’t flinch.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

What I didn’t say, because I didn’t have the words for it yet, and wouldn’t until much later, after February, after everything that came after February, was that somewhere in that twenty minutes on the adjacent court, something had shifted that I’d felt without being able to name. Catherine Voss had arrived expecting a fading complication, a woman recovering from illness and irrelevance in roughly equal measure, someone she could manage with warmth and a few careful sentences.

12

<The Other Count 2

She had left without finishing her practice.

t didn’t know yet what that meant for her. I only knew, putting my bag down in the Lincoln Park hallway, that the conversation had cost me nothing and had clearly cost her something to process.

That was new.

Claum

I sat down to dinner that night and let it be, for now, just that. A strange morning at an unfamiliar facility. A conversation I’d handled without flinching. Nothing more.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify