Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 268

Chapter 256: Tuesday, Months Later.

LUCIAN

The flat in Seattle had the particular quiet of a typical Tuesday evening. In the four-week stretch between the close of competition season and the next round of obligations. It had a rare suspended pocket of time where nobody needed to be anywhere except exactly where they already were.

I was at the kitchen counter, watching the dining room and the living room. There, Lake and Cameron were sitting cross-legged on the floor with a deck of cards spread between them. The cards were in an arrangement that bore no resemblance to any game I recognized.

“Okay,” Lake said, with the gravity of a man delivering settled law. If you draw a red card, you have to say a fact about birds. If you draw a black card, I get an extra turn.”

“That seems unbalanced,” Cameron said.

“It’s the rules.”

“You made the rules four seconds ago.”

“They’re still the rules,” Lake said, unbothered. “Draw.”

Cameron drew. Red.

“A fact about birds,” Lake said, expectant.

“Hadada ibis,” Cameron said very loud that visitors complain.

“That’s not a new fact. You already know that one.”

“You didn’t say it had to be a new fact.”

Lake considered this loophole with visible irritation, the specific frustration of a four-year-old realizing his own rule structure had a gap in it. “Fine, but next time it has to be new.”

“Understood?” Cameron said with the patience of a man who had lost some negotiations. He does not intend to keep losing them indefinitely.

I watched this from the kitchen, stirring something that didn’t need stirring at the moment. And let myself simply have sometime without examining it too closely. It was ordinary. That was the thing I kept returning to. I watched them, how completely, unremarkably, and ordinary it had become. A man and a four-year-old on a living room floor inventing rules that kept shifting in the four-year-old’s favour. And neither of them minded.

I thought about eighteen months ago.

Not with the sharp edges it used to have, that had softened, slowly, the way most painful things softened with enough distance and enough proof of the opposite. But I remembered it clearly enough. The specific terror of loving someone who held my job and my son in the same set of hands. The particular vulnerability of a single father whose entire structure of safety, income, housing, and the careful daily

1:3

<Months Later

legistics that kept Lake’s world steady, depended on the goodwill of a man who could, with a single decision, take all of it away.

I had not let myself feel anything for a long time because of that exact arithmetic. It had seemed, for years, like the only responsible choice: keep Cameron Preston in the category of employer, full stop, regardless of what either of us might have wanted underneath that careful professional surface.

Claim

Cameron had waited. That was the thing came back to most often, turning it over the way you turn over something you’re still grateful for months after the fact. He had not pushed. He had not used the difference in power between us to make anything easier on himself or harder on me to refuse. He had simply waited, patiently, until the ground had shifted enough that wanting him stopped feeling like the most dangerous thing I could do.

And then Lake. Lake, who had needed even more patience than I had, months of careful, unhurried Tuesdays, jollof chips left where he could reach them, a too-small chair by a window, the slow accumulation of evidence that Cameron Preston was not the kind of person who left.

He wasn’t, it turned out.

He had simply stayed until staying stopped requiring proof.

My phone buzzed on the counter.

A text from Lake’s school, Family Day, Friday the 14th, all family members welcome to attend morning activities with students, the kind of generic announcement schools sent out twice a term, the kind that usually required no real decision-making on my part beyond checking a calendar.

This one required a decision.

I looked at it for a moment. Lake’s school used the word family deliberately, inclusively, in the way schools had learned to use it for exactly this reason, so that nobody’s particular shape of family needed special accommodation or explanation. But the actual logistics of who showed up, who Lake introduced as what, still required an answer that didn’t exist by default.

I looked over at the living room. Lake had moved on to explaining a new rule involving the seven of clubs that made even less sense than the previous one. Cameron was nodding along with the specific seriousness he gave to things that mattered to people he loved, regardless of how small those things objectively were.

I walked over.

“Cameron, Lake’s school is doing a family day next Friday. Parents and family members were expected to be there. I was going to ask if you’d want to”

“Yes,” Cameron said.

I looked at and miffed. I hadn’t finished the question.

“You don’t know what I was going to ask yet.

“I know what you were going to ask,” Cameron slammed back.

He looked up at me from the floor, Lake still mid-explanation beside him, entirely unbothered by the interruption. “You were going to ask if I’d come. The answer is yes. It was yes before you started the

23

<Months later.

sentence.”

Lake looked between us. “Come to what?”

“Your school,” I said. “Family day. Friday.”-

Lake considered this with the same gravity he gave everything. “Will there be snacks?”

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