Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 264

Chapter 252. What The Cameras Want.

SEDONA

The photograph was everywhere by Monday morning.

Nick, standing in the third row, both arms raised over his head, his face caught at the exact moment recognition had broken open into something unguarded and enormous. A sports photographer had gotten it, not paparazzi exactly, not at first, just someone covering the bracket who happened to be positioned correctly when a six-year-old’s whole body went still and then erupted into joy.

It should have stayed a sport’s photograph.

It didn’t stay that way.

Maria called at seven, before I’d even seen it myself.

“It’s everywhere,” she said, with the flat efficiency she brought to bad news as easily as good. “Someone identified Nick. Someone connected the dots to the custody case; it’s not hard. The filing is technically a public record; anyone with twenty minutes and a search engine could have pieced it together. ‘Billionaire’s Estranged Wife Stages Tennis Comeback Amid Custody Battle.” That was the version of the story of the headline running across three outlets right now.

I sat down at the kitchen table.

“How many requests?” I said.

“Fourteen interview requests since six a.m. Two morning shows. A sports network wanting an exclusive on the comeback story, specifically. A tabloid wants a comment on the custody filing.” A pause. “And, Sedona, three requests specifically about the photograph. About Nick.”

Something cold moved through me.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Not Nick. Not anything involving him.”

“I already declined those,” Maria said. “I wanted you to hear the number, not agree to anything. You make the call on the rest.”

I met Cameron in the sitting room with his laptop open. There were three browser tabs visible. His disposition showed the stillness of a man who had already assessed the full scope of something before I’d finished my coffee.

“You’ve seen it?” I asked.

“I’ve seen it.”

He turned the screen slightly so I could see what he was looking at on it. It was not the photograph itself, but a tracking document. The kind of tracking Marcus’s team built. The outlets, timestamps, and reach estimates were laid out with clinical precision. “It’s limited to entertainment and sports coverage right now. Not hard news, not yet. That’s good. It means there’s still a window to control the shape of it before it becomes something else.”

13

What The Cantero-Wante

Clam

“Nick didn’t choose this,” I said. “He chose to watch his mother play tennis. He didn’t choose to have his Tace turned into a headline.”

“I know,” Cameron said. He understood, better than almost anyone, exactly what it meant to have something private converted into content without your consent, I thought, briefly, of the courtroom argument about Lucian weeks ago, the careful violation of using someone’s life as a talking point. “Adaeze’s already called. She thinks you need to put out one statement. Controlled, brief, gets ahead of the tabloid version before it calcifies into the only version anyone remembers.”

Adaeze’s reasoning, when she called twenty minutes later, was characteristically precise.

“If you say nothing,” she said, “the story writes itself without you, and it writes itself in whatever direction sells the most. A sympathetic comeback narrative is the kind version. ‘Unstable mother exploiting custody battle for publicity’ is the unkind version, and given Logan’s resources and his lawyer’s demonstrated willingness to leak unflattering framing, I wouldn’t assume the kind version wins by default.”

“I don’t want to talk about Nick,” I said.

“You don’t have to,” Adaeze said. “One sentence acknowledging the match and the photograph, framed entirely around you, your return to competition, nothing about the custody proceedings, nothing that invites further questions about your son. It closes the door rather than opening it further.”

I thought about this for a long moment.

“Help me write it,” I said.

Dante sat with me at the kitchen table that afternoon. A blank document is open. The cursor blinked in that specific way that made every word feel weighted before I’d even chosen it.

wrote forty words first. Too many explanations, almost an apology, the instinct to over-justify myself that I’d spent seven months unlearning, and that apparently still surfaced under enough pressure. After eleven years away from competitive tennis, I’m grateful to be back on the court. The recent attention around my family is understandably difficult. And I ask for privacy as we navigate this season of change, particularly regarding…

“Stop,” Dante said, gently, reading over my shoulder. “You’re explaining. You don’t owe anyone an explanation.”

“I know that,” I said. “It’s harder to feel it than know it.”

He took the laptop, not unkindly, and looked at the forty words for a long moment. Then he deleted most of them.

“What do you actually want people to know?” he said. “Just that. Nothing else.”

I thought about it.

“That I’m back,” I said. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

He typed three words. Looked at me. Turned the screen around.

I’m back. Grateful.

I looked at it for a long time.

23

<What The Camera-Wants

That’s it?” I said.

Clam

“That’s it,” Dante said. “Anything more invites them to ask follow-up questions. Anything less feels evasive. This just says the true thing and stops. He set the laptop down between us. “You don’t have to give them more than the truth requires. Not Nick’s face. Not the custody case. Not eleven years of explanation for a life nobody else has the right to demand an account of.”

I read it again. Five words. The smallest possible window, open just wide enough to satisfy the cameras without handing them anything they could turn into more.

“Adaeze will want to review it,” I said.

“She will,” Dante said. “But it’ll survive review. There’s nothing in it to cut.”

Adaeze approved it within the hour, with one addition, a single sentence about respecting the privacy of family members involved in ongoing legal proceedings, vague enough to apply to everyone and specific enough to function as a formal request that any responsible outlet would honor.

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