Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 260

Chapter 242: Hers.

CATHERINE

I was not rattled by guilt. I want to be clear about that, even to myself, especially to myself, because guilt was an indulgence I had never had the luxury of affording.

I was rattled by something closer to threat assessment. The invitational draw party was the kind of event I usually enjoy, circuit people, sponsors, the specific performance of casualness that everyone in this industry had perfected. I had been to a hundred of them. I knew exactly how to occupy a room like this.

Sedona Preston occupied it differently than I expected. She wasn’t performing recovery. That was what bothered me. Watching her from across the room. A careful distance between us. A glass of something was untouched in her hand.

She wasn’t the fragile comeback story the press had first framed her as. Not the junior champion returning from illness. Not some story built for sympathy and good headlines.

She looked like someone who had simply continued being who she always was, after an interruption. With the specific ease of a woman who had stopped needing anyone’s permission for it.

Dante was beside her. Recovering, visibly, the bandage still on his forearm under a long sleeve, a careful stiffness in how he moved that told anyone paying attention he’d been hurt recently and seriously. He didn’t look diminished by it. He looked like a man who had survived something and intended to keep standing exactly where he’d been standing before.

The hearing had gone better than Logan’s lawyer promised it would.

I had heard this second-hand, through channels I maintained specifically for hearing things second-hand, and I had not enjoyed hearing it.

I found my opening near the bar when Dante had stepped away to speak with a sponsor, and Sedona was, briefly, alone.

“Sedona,” I said. Warm. The same register I’d used at the practice facility, the one I’d perfected across years of circuit politics. “You look well.”

“Catherine.”

I came closer than the people strictly required. My proximity communicated something without saying it outright.

“I wanted to talk to you, a woman to woman, without lawyers or cameras.” A small smile. “Nick is settled, Sedona. He’s doing well. What of school, routine, his evenings with his father, and me? It’s working. I’m not going to pretend that’s not partly my doing, because it. But you know what….

“I know how hard you’ve worked. And still working even now. Not rising to anything.

“Then you understand what I’m asking. Logan is mine to manage. That’s not territorial. It was just an accurate statement. I know how to handle him. I know what he needs, how to keep things calm in that house with him. The custody process is doing what it’s doing. Let it work without complicating things

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further.” Het my voice soften; the warmth I’d built a career on. “I’m protecting Nick’s stability. That’s all I want here.”

This was, I told myself, mostly true.

What I didn’t say was the rest of it. I hadn’t even fully admitted it to myself, not even in the late-night accounting I did in my head.

Logan’s name, Logan’s house, the one I had been managing for three years and had started thinking of as partly mine, by right of labour if nothing else.

And underneath all of it, a growing, uncomfortable thought. If Logan’s position kept falling apart, the stalking complaint, now this attack, the financial trail I’d heard whispered about by people who shouldn’t have been whispering it to me at all, I would need a second plan.

Dante was recovering well. Dante was, by every account, generous, stable, devoted.

I had not let myself finish that thought yet. I can stand standing Sedona Preston watching me with an expression I couldn’t fully read.

“Stay in your lane. Let this work.” Lighter now, almost playful, the velvet over the actual demand.

Sedona looked at me for a long moment. She didn’t get angry. This unsettled me more than anger would have, anger I could have managed, redirected, and used as evidence later that she was unstable, reactive, exactly the unsuitable mother Logan’s lawyer had tried and failed to paint in family court. Anger, I had a whole playbook for.

What she gave me instead was simpler. “Nick was never anyone’s to keep score over,” she said.

That was it. There was no raised voice. No counter-accusation, and no defence of her own position. It was nothing I could carry away and use. That issue was the way she said it carelessly. Like the whole frame I’d built the conversation around didn’t matter to her anymore.

“I’m not keeping score.”

“You are,” Sedona said. Still even. Still pleasant, somehow, despite the precision of it. “You just did it for the last two minutes. Lane, territory, who manages who. That’s a scoreboard, Catherine. I’m not playing.” She glanced toward where Dante was returning from his conversation with the sponsor. “Nick has people who love him. That’s not a competition. It was never going to be one. No matter how much you needed it to be.”

She smiled genuinely, small. There was nothing fake in it. And turned to meet Dante halfway across the room. I stood at the bar alone.

In my mind, I was happy the exchange h had gone exactly as I’d planned. I made myself clear, and I had drawn the line I needed drawn.

This was not entirely true, and some quieter part of me knew it. I had walked into that conversation holding territory, Nick’s routine, Logan’s household, the specific managed stability I had spent three years constructing, and I had walked out of it having lost ground I was not prepared to name out loud, not even to myself.

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