Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 269

Chapter 257: Family Day

CAMERON

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Lake’s school occupied a converted Victorian building in a quiet Seattle neighbourhood. High ceilings. Old radiators that clanked at inconvenient moments. On the morning of Family Day, the place was full of small bodies and big balloons, a building made for adults, temporarily taken over by people under four feet tall.

I had been to corporate functions for fifteen years. Board meetings, shareholder presentations, the careful theatre of professional spaces designed to communicate competence and control. I had never once been nervous walking into any of them.

I was nervous walking into Lake’s classroom. Lucian noticed. “You’re doing the thing with your jaw,” he said quietly, as we signed in at a folding table near the entrance, a volunteer mother handing us name tags shaped like apples.

“What thing.”

“The thing where you’re holding something very still because you’re not sure it’s allowed to move yet.”

He took his apple-shaped sticker. Pressed it to his shirt easily like he’d been here a hundred times before. Like he belonged, something I was still working out how to do.

“Relax. You’re not being assessed.”

“I’m always being assessed somewhere,” I said.

“Not here,” Lucian said. “Here you’re just Lake’s person

I didn’t fully believe him until we walked into the classroom.

Lake spotted us from across the room, where he’d been arranging something on a craft table with the intense focus he brought to all his projects, and his entire face did the thing it had been doing more and more often lately, the open, unguarded delight that had taken eighteen months to arrive and now seemed to surface easily, naturally, like it had simply been waiting underneath the careful assessment all along.

“You came,” he said, arriving at my side at a velocity that suggested running had technically been involved despite the school’s posted rules against it.

“I told you I would,” I said.

“I know. I’m just saying it.” He grabbed my hand casually like someone who had long since stopped asking whether he was allowed to. “Come meet Ms. Okafor. She’s my teacher. She has very organized bulletin boards.”

Ms. Okafor was in her thirties. She had the patient of someone who had chosen to spend her whole career with four-year-olds boys and never once regretted it. She looked up as Lake towed me toward her desk. His grip was firm. His sense of occasion was fully activated.

“Ms. Okafor, Lake announced, like he was introducing visiting dignitaries. “This is Cameron.”

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“Hello, Cameron, I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said, extending a hand.

“He’s my dad’s person,” Lake went on, before I could answer. The explanation kept expanding.

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Enthusiastic. Unprompted. “He works very high up. Twenty-two floors. He has a very good boardroom. I’ve seen it. There were sausages.”

Ms. Okafor’s mouth twitched. “That sounds like an excellent boardroom.”

“It is,” Lake confirmed. “He didn’t used to be very good at being around me. But now he is. He comes on Tuesdays. He also came today, which isn’t even a Tuesday. So that’s extra.”

I felt something move through me that I had not adequately prepared for.

I had managed months of careful, patient Tuesdays without ever once letting the full weight of any single one of them land all at once. ‘I had stayed steady through Lake’s wariness, through the first hesitant you can sit on the chair if you want, through the slow accumulation offevidence that I was, in fact, someone who came back. I had been disciplined about it, deliberately so, because the entire strategy had depended on never making it about my own need to be accepted.

I had not braced for this. For a four-year-old standing in front of his teacher, introducing me with total unselfconscious pride, listing my qualifications, he’s my dad’s person, he has a good boardroom, he comes on Tuesdays, he also came today, as though I were simply, obviously, a fixed and valued part of his life that required no further explanation.

Something in my carefully managed composure cracked.

I didn’t fully manage to hide it. I felt my eyes go warm and had to look briefly at the bulletin board behind Ms. Okafor’s desk, construction paper leaves, each one with a child’s handwriting on it, the specific autumn project every classroom in America seemed to assign, to give myself a second to recover before anyone noticed.

Lucian noticed anyway. He always noticed.

He didn’t say anything. He just put a hand briefly on my back, the same quiet thing he’d done a hundred times over the last year and a half, and let me have the moment without making it bigger than it needed to

“It’s lovely to meet you, Cameron, Ms. Okafor said. The kind grace of someone who’d clearly watched this exact unravelling happen to plenty of adults in her classroom before. She knew enough not to say anything about it. “Lake talks about you often.”

“All good things, I hope,” I managed.

“Almost entirely,” she said, smiling. “He did mention you were slow to understand a card game once. He was quite patient about it.”

“He invents new rules mid-game,” I said. “It’s not a fair assessment of my comprehension.”

“That tracks,” Ms. Okafor said, with the specific dry humor of someone who knew exactly which child she was dealing with.

The rest of the morning passed in the particular warm chaos of a classroom full of families, craft tables, a sing-along that Lake participated in with more enthusiasm than accuracy, a snack table where he insisted,

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Family Day

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loudly and at length, that I needed to try the cheese cubes specifically because he had personally vetted Them earlier in the day.

Other parents noticed me. Helt it the way you feel any room recalibrating around an unexpected presence. I had spent fifteen years managing exactly this kind of attention in boardrooms and galas and the careful performances of corporate life.

Here, it didn’t matter the way it usually mattered.

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