Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 266

Chapter 254: Reading Him

SEDONA

I knew something was wrong before he said a single word that proved it.

It was Thursday, our usual call day, and I’d been looking forward to it all day, the way I always did. I cleared space in my head for it, putting everything else down so I could give him the whole of my attention. He picked up on the first ring, which was normal. He said hi, which was normal.

But something in his voice wasn’t.

“How was school?” I asked.

“Fine.”

One word. Not the usual flood of information I’d come to expect.

“Anything interesting happen?”

“Not really.”

I sat with that for a second. I’d learned, across months of these calls, the actual texture of Nick’s voice. The way it moved when he was excited, the careful pacing he used when he was building up to something important. This wasn’t any of those.

“You sound a little far away today.”

“I’m just tired.”

I let it sit there. I wanted to push, every part of me wanted to push, to ask three more questions and keep asking until whatever this was came loose. But I’d learned this too, slowly. Nick didn’t open up because you pulled at him. He opened up when he decided the door was safe enough to open on his own.

So I didn’t push.

“Okay, bug, I love you. Same time next week?”

“Yeah, love you too.”

He hung up first, unlike him.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a few seconds after the call ended. I turned the conversation over. looked for the place where it had gone wrong.

This was something I’d learned from Dr. Mitchell, actually, not the specific habit, but the underlying instinct. Notice what’s different. Name it without judgment. Don’t assume you know what it means yet. I’d spent a year learning to apply that to myself.

Something had happened. I didn’t know what. I wasn’t going to guess my way to an answer that might be wrong and might make things worse if I acted on the wrong guess.

13

Reading Hu

Lealled Mrs. Peterson.

“Has anything happened recently?” I asked. “Nick seemed different on the phone today. Quieter than usual.

I don’t want to read into it if it’s nothing, but I trust your read on him more than I trust my own guessing.”

There was a small pause on her end. It was like sorting through the days, trying to locate whatever I was asking about.

“There was a visit on Tuesday,” she said slowly. “When Dante came to collect you. Drew was with him.”

Something went very still in my chest.

“Nick met Drew that day,” she continued. “Briefly. In the lobby, while we were waiting for you to finish with Adaeze. It wasn’t planned, I don’t think Dante expected to bring him along either, something about school being out early.” A pause. “He’s seemed a bit different since then, now that you mention it. I hadn’t put it together before.”

I closed my eyes.

“Thank you,” I said. “That helps.”

I sat on the edge of my bed in the Lincoln Park house for a long time after that call, putting the pieces together the way you put together something you already half-knew the shape of before you’d seen all the parts.

Nick had met Drew. A boy younger than him, who lived, at least partly, at least often enough for it to register, in the house I was staying in. The house with his grandparents in it. The house with Dante in it, and me, and a garden, and a whole life happening every single day that Nick only got to glimpse for two hours every few weeks through a carefully scheduled visit.

I understood immediately what this had likely done to him. I didn’t need him to say it out loud, because I recognized the specific shape of the fear even without the words attached to it,the particular terror of a child who believed, somewhere deep and wordless, that love was a finite thing. That if Drew got to live in that house, got to wake up under that roof every morning, got to be the boy who stayed instead of the boy who visited, then somehow there might not be enough left over for Nick.

It wasn’t true. It had never once been true. But I understood, with the specific clarity that came from having spent three years believing something similarly wrong about my own worth, that knowing a fear

۴ isn’t true doesn’t make it weigh any less when you’re the one carrying it.

I thought about calling him back immediately. Explaining it over the phone, untangling it right then, while the wound was still fresh and easy to find.

I decided against it.

This needed to be said in person. Not delivered through a phone line where I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t read whether the words were landing the way I meant them to, couldn’t simply hold him the moment it got hard. And it needed to be said carefully,not as a correction, not as that’s silly, Nick, of course I still love you, the kind of dismissal that would make him feel caught out for having felt something at all. Children didn’t need their fears argued away. They needed them to be taken seriously enough to receive a proper

response.

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