Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 274

Chapter 262. Reading About Yourself,

SEDONA

Claire

Cameron sent it to me before I saw it anywhere else. This was deliberate, he’d told me once, early before all this, he always wanted me to know it from him, rather than being blindsided by a stranger comment or remark.

“You need to see something. Call me when you’re free.

I read it alone first, using the privacy I had to process what I was feeling, seeing this.

“Comeback or Calculated? Inside Sedona Preston’s Custody-Timed Return to Tennis.” I took time to read through it thoroughly.

The competitor announcement was framed as deliberately timed. The photograph of Nick at the school gate, used as evidence of something I’d never once intended, designed to seek sympathy in the public

eyes.

It described a woman I didn’t recognize. A strategist. Someone who had calculated a tennis comeback the way you’d calculate a legal manoeuvre, who had allowed her own son’s face to become public exactly when it would generate the most useful sympathy.

I sat with the specific, surreal violence of it for a long time.

This was not the same as the stalking complaint, or the garden, or Logan’s hand on my arm. Those had been attacks I understood the shape of immediately, physical, direct, the kind of harm that didn’t require interpretation. This was different. This was someone taking the actual years of my life being treated like furniture and then my hard won recovery, then a son I had nearly died without ever holding again, and rewriting it into a narrative that suited them and made me the villain.

I had not chosen any of this. I had not chosen illness, or Logan, or a hearing date that happened to overlap with a competition bracket Maria had registered me for months in advance. I had simply tried to survive, and then tried to come back, and somewhere in the space between those two things, a stranger had decided my survival looked, from the outside, like a strategy.

ľ

Cameron called an hour later. I let it ring twice before answering, giving myself the last few seconds of processing it alone.

“I read it,” I said.

“I know. Maria’s already furious. She’s filed a complaint with the outlet. Adaeze says there’s nothing legally actionable in it, everything’s written carefully enough to survive scrutiny, but she wanted you to know your options regardless.”

“What options?”

“A rebuttal. A statement correcting the framing. Maria can place something with a more sympathetic outlet within the week if you want to get ahead of it.” A pause. “Dante wants to say something, too. He’s furious, Sedona. I don’t think I’ve seen him this angry since the hospital.”

113

Reading About Yourself

Hthought about this for a long moment,

“I don’t want to respond.”

“Sedona…”

“Let me explain. If I put out a rebuttal, I’m engaging with a story that was never built to be argued with. It’s not a factual claim I can disprove with one clean correction.”

It’s an impression, a frame, designed to make people wonder rather than to state something I can point to and say that’s false. Arguing with an impression just keeps it alive longer. It gives it another news cycle.”

I looked out the kitchen window, the same view I’d been looking at all month, Chicago grey and patient and indifferent. “I have a real record, Cameron. Dr. Mitchell’s documentation. Three years of pharmacy receipts in my own name. Ad’aeze’s entire case. None of that needs my defensive commentary to be true. It already is true, and it’s already in the record that actually matters.”

Cameron was quiet for a moment.

“You’re choosing restraint,” he said. Not a question, recognition.

“I’m choosing to let the actual evidence keep doing the talking,” I said. “Instead of giving a stranger’s framing more oxygen by fighting it directly.”

This was harder than it sounded, saying it out loud, calm and reasoned, the way I’d just said it to Cameron. The decision itself had cost me something to reach, sitting alone with the article for that first hour, feeling the specific helplessness of being narrated wrongly by someone with a platform and no actual stake in getting it right.

What made it harder, underneath all of it, was Catherine. I hadn’t known, not for certain, not until Cameron mentioned it carefully an hour into the conversation, that Marcus’s team had traced the sourcing pattern back to someone close to Logan’s household, someone with motive and access and a documented relationship with the journalist who’d written it. He didn’t say her name outright. He didn’t need to.

I had not expected this to land where it landed. Catherine and I had never been close, not in any real sense, not the way the article’s careful insinuations implied, two women locked in some manufactured rivalry.

But there had been a version of her, early on. Before everything. Someone who had felt almost like a person I might have been friends with in a different life. Circuit-adjacent. Someone who understood what it was like, a life built around tennis and travel, and the particular loneliness that came with both.

To learn that she had been the one feeding a journalist a version of my life designed to hurt me, designed, specifically, to use my own son’s face as ammunition, landed somewhere quieter than anger. Somewhere closer to grief. The specific loneliness of realizing someone you’d once, however briefly, considered almost a friend had decided, when it mattered, to use you instead.

I didn’t say any of this to Cameron. Some of it I didn’t fully have words for yet. The same way Nick hadn’t had words for what Drew’s existence had stirred up in him. I just sat with it.

“Tell Dante I love him for wanting to fight this,” I said. “But tell him I need him to let me handle it this way. Quietly. Letting the record speak instead of me.”

Reading About Yourself

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