Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 273

Chapter 261.The Article

CATHERINE

I had not planned to do anything reckless. I want to be clear on that in my own accounting. I had planned, for weeks, managing different ongoing situations at the same time, I had been sending the patient texts to Dante, the script handed to Sherry, the quiet threats that was needed to shape things how I needed them to go.

But this was different. This was a decision made in a single evening, after a single phone call from Alina that had left me sitting with my wine glass empty and my hands not quite steady, watching everything I build for, collaspe.

I called Priya Shah the next morning.

I had known Priya for years, a sports journalist who covered the circuit and focused more on telling stories that would piss off the people it was told about. We had a history of mutual usefulness. I gave her good quotes when I needed coverage. She gave my speech to press the generous framing they required.

I called her not as a source but as someone offering a perspective.

“I’m not asking you to print anything I say directly,” I told her, careful with the framing, the way I was careful with everything. “I just think there’s a more complete picture of the Preston comeback story that nobody’s covering. The timing of it. The custody battle is running in parallel. It’s worth asking whether the attention serves her case more than it serves the sport.”

gave her enough, not lies, nothing I could be caught in outright, just selection. The fact that the competitor announcement had dropped during an active custody dispute. The fact that the school gate photograph had circulated so widely and so fast, with Nick visible. The fact that a woman who’d been absent from competitive tennis for eleven years had returned at the exact moment her custody case needed sympathetic public framing.

I left out everything that complicated the story. The stalking complaint. The attack on Dante. Seventeen months of genuine, hard-won recovery that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with survival.

I told myself this was incomplete but not dishonest. Somewhere underneath the careful self-justification, I knew that distinction didn’t really hold up.

The article ran four days later.

“Comeback or Calculated? Inside Sedona Preston’s Custody-Timed Return to Tennis.”

It was worse than I’d expected. Priya had taken what I’d given her and built an entire framework around it, quotes from anonymous “sources familiar with the situation,” speculation about whether the competitor announcement timing had been deliberately engineered to generate sympathy ahead of the December hearing, a closing paragraph that questioned, with careful journalistic hedging, whether a mother fighting for custody should be drawing this much public attention to her child in the process.

I read it three times. I felt, on the first read, something close to satisfaction. The specific cold pleasure of

1.3

The Article

watching a plan I’d set in motion actually move, actually land, actually cost the person I’d aimed it at something real.

By the third read, the satisfaction had started to curdle into something else.

Claim

Maria called Sedona’s team within the hour. Apparently, I heard about this second-hand but rumors being spread around and people talking. A statement from Maria herself calling the framing “reckless and unsupported by any actual reporting.”

Adaeze, predictably, flagged it as legally toothless; nothing in it rose to defamation. Every claim hedged carefully enough to survive scrutiny. It just needed to exist, to be searchable, to sit alongside Sedona’s name in every future search result, regardless of how thoroughly it was eventually debunked.

I had wanted that. I had wanted exactly that.

I sat with it for two days, watching the fallout from a careful distance, telling myself the satisfaction I’d felt on the first read was the version of this I was entitled to keep.

Alina called on the third day. “You did this,” she said. No question in it.

“How do you mean?”

“Catherine, I know Priya Shah. I know her sourcing patterns. I know exactly the kind of person who feeds her exactly that kind of information currently spreading around, and I know you’ve used her before.”

Her voice had the flatness of someone who had stopped pretending the conversation needed diplomacy.

‘Tell me I’m wrong.”

I smiled and retorted, “You’re not wrong.”

‘God, Catherine. What were you thinking?”

‘Logan’s situation is collapsing,” I said. “I needed to protect my own position. And to remind people that there’s a more complicated story here than the one everyone’s been telling.”

‘You needed to attack a woman whose ex-husband ordered a man stabbed in a parking lot,” Alina said.

‘While you’re still living in that same man’s household. Managing his mother’s talking points. Texting his ex-wife’s new partner to keep your options open.” Her voice had an edge I’d never fully heard from her before. Not just disapproval. Something closer to a genuine alarm. “Do you understand what you’ve actually done here?”

You’ve tied your name publicly to a smear campaign against the mother in a custody case where the father is under criminal investigation for attempted murder. If this gets traced back to you,and these things get traced back, Catherine, eventually, they always do, you’re not just collateral damage anymore.

“You’re an active participant in the story that took Logan down.” My heart ached, and something cold. moved through my chest.

“It can’t be traced. I never went on record.”

“You think that protects you?” Alina said. “You think Priya Shah’s sourcing stays confidential forever if this becomes the kind of story that gets real legal attention? If Adaeze Hendricks decides it’s worth

23

The Article

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