Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 256

Chapter 247. Whether to Play.

DANTE

The decision was supposed to be simple. It either heals or doesn’t heal fast enough. Whether the match was played or not…… Ten days out from the quarterfinal I’d been working toward since María first watched me coach Sedona through a forehand in a Seattle facility, the math should have been straightforward.

It wasn’t… What we expected. My ribs were healing well: The doctor said so at the follow-up, pressing along the bruised line with careful fingers, satisfied with the progress. The stitches in my forearm would come out in three more days, The concussion symptoms had cleared faster than expected, no more dizziness, the headaches were gone, and my reflexes were testing normal in every drill the physio had run me through.

My body was ready, or close enough to ready that the medical case for playing was solid. The other case, the one nobody had a chart for, was harder.

A man with a knife and a financial trail running back toward a name I now understood with total clarity had tried to kill me in a parking lot at six in the morning. He was in custody. He wasn’t talking. The trail toward Logan was close but not closed, Cameron had been honest about that, and “close but not closed” was not the same as “finished.”

Maria wanted me to play. The momentum mattered, for me, for Sedona’s own profile by extension, for the story the circuit was already writing about both of us. Withdrawing this close to a major event would cost something real, the kind of cost that took years to rebuild.

I sat with all of it longer than I usually sat with decisions.

Drew found me in the Lincoln Park sitting room two days before I had to give Maria a final answer.

He climbed onto the sofa beside me with his notebook, which he set down unopened, a small detail I noticed immediately, because Drew rarely sat anywhere without it open and ready. He was here for something else.

“Dad…”

“Yes.”

す

He was quiet for a few seconds, maybe thinking about how to formulate the question with the same care he gave to everything. “Is the man who hurt you going to come back?”

I had thought about how I would answer this if he asked. I had not expected him to ask quite this directly, but Drew rarely did anything indirectly when the truth could be requested plainly instead.

I set down what I was holding. I gave him my full attention. The way he always gave me his.

“I don’t know why he is in the police net. He can’t hurt anyone today. But the person who might have paid him to do it hasn’t been arrested. So I can’t say it’s completely finished. I don’t know that for certain.”

Drew absorbed this. He didn’t jerk. He didn’t look away. He just processed it the way he processed a bird he hadn’t catalogued before, carefully, completely, no rush to file it before he’d looked at it from every

<Whether To Play 1.

angle

“The police caught part of what happened,” I said.

Claim

“Not all of it yet. There are people now whose job is specifically to keep us safe. Cameron arranged it, and they’re very good at their job.

“I didn’t pretend nothing happened. You’d see right through it. And that wouldn’t help either of us. But it was also not going to stop living because of one scared morning. That wasn’t who I want to be. And it’s not who I want you to learn to be either.”

He nodded.

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