Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 247

Chapter 239: The Hospital

SEDONA

“Dante’s hurt. He’s going to be okay, but you need to come now,” Cameron said over the phone.

Clam

I don’t remember deciding to move. I remember being in motion before the sentence had finished, already off the bed, already reaching for the coat on the chair, my mind catching up to my body a full beat behind it, the same delay Cameron had once described in his own reflexes the morning he found me bleeding in a hotel room.

“Where,” I said.

“Northwestern Memorial. I’m already there. He’s stable, Sedona. He’s stable.” Cameron’s voice had the specific flatness he used when he needed me to hear the facts before the feeling reached me. “Get dressed. I’ll send a car.”

I didn’t wait for the car.

The house came apart and reassembled itself around the news in under three minutes.

My mother was already up, she heard everything in that house, always had, some maternal frequency that never fully switched off, and by the time I reached the hallway she had Drew in her arms. He had gone very still. Not crying. Stiller than crying, the specific quiet of a six-year-old whose mind had understood something his body hadn’t found the shape for yet. My mother held him the way she held things she had decided to carry completely, no part of the weight set down.

Lake appeared in the doorway of his room. Uncharacteristically subdued. His usual narration completely

gone.

He crossed the hall without a word and sat beside Drew on the bottom stair. He didn’t ask what had happened. He didn’t offer a theory or report an observation, and from Lake, that was its own kind of alarm. He just sat close enough that their shoulders touched. Present in the only way a four-year-old knew how to be present. Drew let him stay there.

My father was already dressed when I came down. He moved with the economy of a man who had absorbed the worst of it. He instantly decided the only useful response was speed.

He didn’t say much in the car while driving. And he never did when something mattered most.

The city slid past in the grey pre-dawn light. He was doing the thing he always did – holding something completely still inside himself until he understood it well enough to speak about it at all.

I pressed my forehead briefly to the cold glass. And closed my eyes. The car carried us forward through streets that had no idea what they were carrying.

Northwestern Memorial’s waiting room was fluorescent and far too bright for the hour.

Cameron was already there, on his feet, moving toward us before the automatic doors had fully opened. He looked at me first, the fast, complete inventory he always ran, and then at my parents arriving behind

3

The Hospital

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“He’s stable.” he said again, the words clearly rehearsed, saved specifically to be the first thing we heard in person. “Stitches on his forearm. Concussion. Cracked ribs. The doctor says he’s going to be fine.”

“Fine,”

my father repeated. Not a question. The flat testing of a word against what he already suspected it was concealing.

“He fought him off,” Cameron said, quieter now, almost to himself. “Whoever it was. Dante fought him off.”

I sat down because my legs began to pain me. I had decided standing was no longer something I could do.

A small smile played on my lips.

My father went to the window.

He stood there with his hands pushed into his coat pockets, looking out at the city beginning its grey morning, the particular stillness he wore when committing something to memory. I knew this posture too well. I had watched him hold it at my own hospital bedside seventeen months ago. I had watched it again at Nick’s school gate, three weeks ago, when he set his newspaper down mid-page. He held the same posture now, watching nothing in particular through the glass, processing everything.

My mother arrived twenty minutes later with Lucian, Drew, and Lake trailing behind, all of them having apparently refused, regardless of what anyone said about children staying home, to be left out of this. My mother took the chair beside me without a word and put her hand over mine. It was warm. Mine wasn’t.

Drew sat very close to my father near the window, silent, his notebook untouched in his lap for the first time since I’d known him. After a moment my father set a hand briefly on his shoulder. Drew leaned into it, just slightly, the smallest concession to needing comfort that I had ever seen him make.

The doctor came out at six-fifty.

He had the flatness doctors use when the reassurance is true and they also know, professionally, how much it leaves out.

“He’s going to be fine thought the cut took twenty-two stitches. Deep. But it missed anything structurally significant.”

Mild concussion. Two cracked ribs, consistent with blunt impact during a struggle.” He glanced at the cluster of us, too many people for a single bedside update, clearly, though he didn’t comment on it. “He’s lucid. Asking for someone named Sedona.”

I stood up so fast the chair scraped.

He was groggy when I came in.

The hospital bed made him look smaller than he was, which struck me as fundamentally wrong, Dante Wells, who filled every room he entered with his particular settled, solid presence, reduced now to a bandaged forearm and a dressing along his hairline and an IV taped to the back of his hand.

He looked at me. Something in his face tried for a smile and mostly managed it, crooked, slow, but real.

“Sorry,” he said. His voice was thick, slowed by whatever they’d given him. “Ruined the morning.”

I stood at the edge of the bed and felt something inside me crack open completely. Not at the bandages.

2/3

(The Hospual

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