Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 272

Chapter 260. Jennifer At the Door.

SEDONA

I hadn’t expected it to land the way it landed.

I had stood on the porch and said everything was true. Everything steadily okay. Every word exactly the way Adaeze would have wanted me to say it, factually and unmoved. I had watched Sherry’s car pull away, and I felt, for a moment, the satisfaction of having held my own ground completely.

Then the satisfaction drained out of me. All at once. And what was left underneath it was the old pull. The way that I had forced myself to accept her insults because I wanted her to accept me as her daughter in law.

The same woman who had once stood in a hallway in Chicago and told me, plainly, that I had always been a placeholder. That Logan had only ever married me because the timing had been convenient. That I should not mistake his patience for love. That woman had just stood on a porch and called me like a daughter. And some small, exhausted part of me had wanted to believe her despite everything I knew,

I hated that part of me. I stood there in the cold. My hand is still on the door. And I hated it anyway.

The door opened behind me before I’d fully composed myself.

My mother stepped out, and I understood immediately that she’d heard more than she’d let on.

“That was Sherry Hayes,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“What did she want?”

I told her. The mental health appeal. The like a daughter comment. The request to soften the custody position. The careful manipulation is dressed up as maternal concern. My mother listened without interrupting. Her jaw tightened slightly with each sentence. Until I’d said all of it.

“She’s still here,” my mother said. “Isn’t she. The car hasn’t gone far.”

“I think she’s stopped at the corner,” I said. “Probably waiting for the driver to confirm directions.”

She walked down the steps.

I followed her. Not entirely sure what I was about to witness. Only sure that I needed to be there for it.

The car had indeed stopped at the corner, idling, Sherry visible through the back window, her phone to hex ear. My mother walked directly to the car and knocked on the window with two precise knuckles.

Sherry lowered it, startled.

“Mrs. Hayes,” my mother said. Pleasant. Devastating in the specific way only genuine politeness delivered with total conviction could be. “I don’t believe we’ve met properly. I’m Jennifer Preston.”

“Mrs. Preston, I was just…”

13

Jennifer ALThe Door

Clam

+know exactly what you were just doing,” my mother said, still pleasant, still entirely without raised volume, the particular quality of a woman who did not need to shout to be terrifying. “You were standing in my daughter’s doorway, asking her to make things easier for a man who has spent the last year and a half terrorizing her. I heard enough of it through the window to understand the shape of the conversation.”

Sherry’s face went pale.

“I want you to hear something clearly,” my mother continued, “since you came all this way to be heard yourself. I know what you said to my daughter in a hallway in Chicago, while she was dying, and nobody around her knew it yet. I know you told her she was never wanted. I know you watched a young woman come apart in front of you for six years and called it instability instead of what it actually was, which was a marriage destroying a person slowly enough that everyone around her could pretend not to notice.”

“I didn’t…”

“You did,” my mother said. Simple. Final. “And now you’ve come to ask her to be gentle with the man who did it, framed as concern for his health, after he sent someone to attack the father of the child she loves. I find that remarkable, Mrs. Hayes. I find it genuinely remarkable that you believed this was a conversation worth having.”

Sherry said nothing. Her hand had gone still on her phone.

“I would like you to leave this property,” my mother said, still pleasant, still without an ounce of raised volume. “And I would like you to understand, very clearly, that if you come near my daughter again outside of whatever legal channels exist, I will personally make sure her attorney knows about it within the hour. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes,” Sherry said. Small.

“Good,” my mother said. “Drive safely.”

She stepped back from the car. The window went up. The car pulled away. This time it didn’t stop at the next corner. It simply went. The way things go when they’ve finally understood they’re not wanted somewhere.

My mother turned and walked back toward the house. I followed her. But we did not talk until we were inside the house with the door shut.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked already moving toward the kitchen. As though she hadn’t just delivered the most devastating dressing-down I had ever seen. From a woman who had not once raised her voice to do it.

I sat at the kitchen table while she made it, the specific industry of her at the stove, the same rhythm that had carried me through Seattle and the hearing and the long nights with the box of Nick’s medical records spread across a borrowed bed.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I had it handled.”

“I know you did.”

23

Jenniter ALThe Door “Why did do it?”

Claim

+ looked at her and retorted. “I did it because you shouldn’t have to handle everything alone. Not

everything, Sedona. Not even the things you’re perfectly capable of handling.” She wrapped her hands around her own cup. There’s a difference between being capable and having to be capable every single time, with no one standing beside you. You had years of that. I’m not interested in watching you have more

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