Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 257

Whether To Play-2

“You don’t have to watch for anything? That’s the security team’s job.”

Yours is just to watch tennis and eat too many snacks.”

“I know that’s the official job,” Drew said, with the precision of someone correcting a minor inaccuracy. “But I would feel better if I also watched. Two sets of eyes catch more than one set.” He said this with complete reasonableness, as though he were explaining a fact about birds rather than a coping mechanism he’d built for himself in the space of forty-eight hours.

Claim

I didn’t argue with him. I pulled him in instead, careful of my ribs, and held him for a moment longer than either of us probably needed, and let him watch for whatever he needed to watch for if it helped him feel like the world was a place he had some say in.

I decided to play. Not bravado, I want to be precise about that, the way Drew would want me to be precise. It wasn’t a decision made to prove anything to Logan, or to the circuit, or to myself. It was a decision made carefully; with input I’d actually weighed instead of overridden.

Cameron and I sat with the security detail the next morning, a full review of the facility’s access points, the gaps that had existed before, and the ones being closed now, a revised schedule that eliminated the six a.m. solo sessions entirely. Someone would be with me at all times outside the Lincoln Park house. No exceptions, no habits fifteen years deep that excused themselves back into the routine.

“I want Sedona’s read on this, too,” I told Cameron. “Not as a formality. Actually, her input.”

He looked at me for a moment, something approving in his expression, and made the call.

She came down to the sitting room within minutes. I told her everything. The medical clearance, the security revisions, Drew’s question, and what I’d told him, the full shape of the decision I was leaning

toward.

She listened with rapt attention, her usual way, as I was talking. When I finished shopping waited for a few seconds before saying a word.

“I don’t want you to play out of stubbornness. If any part of this is about proving something to him, that’s not a good enough reason.

It’s not that,” I said. “I checked myself on it. It’s that I don’t want to hand him something else. Not on top of everything else he’s already taken. And I don’t want to teach Drew that the answer to fear is disappearing.”

She held my eyes for a long moment. “Then play,” she said. “But the new security stays in place after the tournament, too. This isn’t a ten-day precaution. It’s the new normal until that financial trail closes completely.”

“Agreed,” I said.

She nodded once, satisfied, and something in the decision settled into place – not because I’d convinced myself alone in a room, but because the people who mattered most had weighed in and the weight had been real, not ceremonial.

I called Maria that afternoon.

712

<Whether To Play ?

I’m playing,” I said.

Clam

“Good,” she said, with the flat efficiency she brought to everything. Then, after a pause that was almost unlike her: “How are you, Dante. Actually.”

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