Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 263

Chapter 251. Contingency.”

CATHERINE

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I had spent three years managing Logan Hayes. I had gotten good at it, the public version of him, anyway, the version that walked into boardrooms and dinners and the occasional charity gala with the composed certainty everyone expected. I knew exactly how to keep that version intact.

What I had not anticipated was needing to manage two versions at once: the public one, and the private one that was, increasingly, threatening to consume the first.

I started with Sherry.

She called me three times a week now, anxious, circling the same worry without ever naming it directly: he’s drinking more, he’s not himself, he won’t talk to me about what’s really wrong, and I had learned, across our overlapping years orbiting the same man, exactly how to redirect that anxiety into something useful.

“If anyone from the press asks,” I told her, over coffee at the apartment she’d taken since the divorce filings began consuming most of Logan’s attention, “you say Logan has been focused on Nick, on rebuilding stability for his son during a difficult transition. You don’t mention the custody filing specifics. You don’t mention the criminal investigation if anyone even asks about that, which they shouldn’t, because it hasn’t been reported anywhere yet.”

“It’s not reported,” Sherry said. “Is it going to be?”

“Not if we’re careful,” I said. Which was true, technically, though I was already several steps ahead of where Sherry’s anxiety lived. I had a contact, a PR consultant I’d used quietly for my own circuit image, someone good, someone discreet, and I had already started feeding her the outline of a narrative we could deploy if the criminal investigation ever broke publicly. A father under enormous strain. A custody battle that brought out the worst in everyone involved. There were charges, but no convictions. Only allegations from a man with every incentive to lie his way to a reduced sentence. It wasn’t a lie per se. It was simply a means to protect what I wanted protected.

Sherry nodded, relieved to have something to hold onto, some script to follow. She had always responded well to scripts. It was, I had come to understand, the family trait that had made Logan ‘so easy to manage for so long, give a Hayes something to perform, and they would perform it convincingly, right up until the performance cracked.

The texts to Dante started small.

Hope you’re getting well. What happened was big. I’m glad you’re okay.

Careful. Deniable. The kind of thing anyone might text a man who’d been attacked. To an outsider, it would look like a simple concern. Nothing more.

He replied once, briefly, politely, and distantly: Thank you. Healing well.

I didn’t push further immediately. I understood the math of this the way I understood the math of everything: you didn’t close a door by leaning on it too hard. You left it slightly open and waited to see

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Contigeng

whether circumstances widened the gap for you.

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tsent another message a week later, after the competition, after I’d watched from Court 3, at a distance,

from behind sunglasses, telling myself was simply scouting the venue’s conditions, Sedona’s son standing in the third row with both arms raised over his head.

Glad you’re back on court. Looked strong.

Another polite, brief reply. Thanks, Catherine

I filed this the way I filed everything now, not as rejection, just as data. The door was still slightly open. It simply required more patience than I’d initially assumed.

I was not unaware of what I was doing.

If Logan imploded, and the trajectory I was watching suggested he might, the drinking, the fury underneath the careful control, the financial trail Sherry had let slip details of without fully understanding what she was telling me, I needed something secured before the collapse fully arrived. Dante Wells was generous, stable, devoted, exactly the kind of man whose orbit a person could fall into and find genuine safety inside. If that door ever opened further, I intended to be standing in front of it.

And if it didn’t open, if Dante remained exactly as polite and exactly as distant as his texts suggested he intended to stay, then I needed Logan’s name secured before anyone else got there first. Before the divorce proceedings were settled. Before whatever remained of his fortune and his standing got divided in ways that left me holding nothing for three years of labour, I had quietly, carefully, never once let myself think of it as anything less than an investment.

I had two fronts. I intended to manage both until one of them resolved in my favour.

Alina called on a Thursday evening. The specific timing she used when she’d been working up to saying something.

“You need to slow down,” she said, without preamble.

“Slow down, what?”

“All of it.”

There was a change in her voice I hadn’t heard before. Closer to real unease. “I’ve been hearing things, Catherine. Not from you. From other places. The investigation into Logan isn’t some minor

custody-adjacent thing anymore. People are saying attempted murder. A cooperating witness. A financial trail that’s apparently not circumstantial.”

“I don’t know the details,” I said. Which was mostly true.

“You don’t need all the information to tell what I told you,” Alina said. Managing Logan used to mean managing his image. The drinking. The temper. The way he treated the people who worked for him.”

That was manageable. That was something you could spin.” A pause. “What you’re describing now is managing someone who might be a genuine criminal liability. That’s not the same category of risk, Catherine. That’s not something good PR fixes. If this breaks the way it sounds like it could break, anyone standing too close to him goes down with the story, whether they did anything or not.”

I was quiet for a moment.

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Contigence

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