Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 261

Chapter 250. What He Tells Himself

LOGAN

Claim

The whiskey was a habit I had formed without quite noticing when it had started. I took two fingers at six every day in the evening the way some men poured coffee in the morning. It had become a ritual that marked the day’s transition rather than a problem, I had told myself that problems were things other people had.

I was on my third by seven. The custody motion had failed. Both of them, actually the medical neglect angle, dismantled by Adaeze Hendricks with the kind of surgical precision I’d expected from someone I’d hired myself. And then the other thing, the Cameron Preston angle my lawyer had warned me against and I had insisted on that anyway because I needed something, anything, to slow the momentum that kept building against me.

Irrelevancy was the word the judge had used. My lawyer had relayed it to me in the flat and careful tone he used now for everything. The tone of a man managing a client he was beginning to suspect was a liability rather than simply a difficult case.

I poured another two fingers.

I sat in the apartment that had been ours and was now, technically, simply mine. The labelled suits gone, and the lavender cream gone, every trace of her removed. And I thought about how thoroughly the world had decided to misunderstand me.

I had not abandoned her. This was the thing nobody seemed willing to grasp. The thing I had returned to again and again in the quiet hours after Sherry had gone home and Catherine was at the facility and the apartment held nothing but the silence of a place built for two people that now held one.

She had left. She had gotten on a plane with no warning, and just left. I believed this, I had always believed it regardless of what the documentation said, because the documentation was assembled by people who had decided, somewhere along the way, I was the villain in a story I had simply been trying to hold together.

I had built everything. The company, the apartment, the life that should have been enough for any reasonable woman to want to stay inside. I had not been perfect, I would grant that much, in the careful private accounting. I allowed myself but I had not been the monster the custody filings made me out to be.

She had abandoned me and had gone to her brother’s family.

And then Dante Wells had stolen what remained.

I’d had some equal claim that simply hadn’t worked out. Sedona was mine. Six years of marriage, a child together, a life I had built around the assumption of her permanence in it. Dante Wells had simply walked into that and taken what was already spoken of, the way certain men did, the kind who believed charm and patience entitled them to things that belonged to other people.

Sherry let herself in around eight.

183

<What He Tell Himself

Clam

She had been doing this more often, appearing without calling first, finding reasons to be in the house, watching me with the specific anxious attention of a rnother who had decided something was wrong and was determined to manage it through proximity rather than confrontation.

“You’re drinking again, she said. Not a question.

“I have a drink most evenings, Mum.”

“Three glasses isn’t a drink.” She sat across from me, her coat still on.

“Logan. I know this has been hard. The hearing, the filing not going the way we hoped…”

“It went exactly as expected,” I said. “Hendricks is good. I never assumed she wouldn’t be.”

“It’s more than the hearing.” She watched me carefully. “You’re not yourself.”

She thought it was grief. I could see it in her face, the maternal misreading she’d been performing for weeks now and her son, broken-hearted, drinking through the loss of a marriage and a family that had been taken from him, in need of comfort rather than correction.

I let her believe it. It was easier than the alternative. And the alternative wasn’t anything I intended to share with my mother over a glass of whiskey on a Tuesday evening.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Tired. The case takes a lot out of a person.”

She didn’t fully believe me. I could see that too. But she let it sit, the way she let most things sit when pushing further would have required a confrontation she wasn’t equipped to have.

She left an hour later, reluctantly, with the specific worry of a mother who sensed something curdling in her son and had no language for what it actually was

My lawyer called at nine-forty.

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