Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 278

Chapter 266: The Picnic After

SEDONA

I don’t remember deciding to get to him just remember being beside him. My knees on the grass. My hands were hovering over his small body because I didn’t know yet where it was safe to touch.

“Nick.” My voice didn’t sound like mine.

“Nick, baby, look at me. Nick.”

His eyes were closed. Blood was moving along his hairline in a thin, steady line, dark against his skin, more of it than my mind could process as anything except catastrophic.

“Don’t move him,” my mother’s voice, sharp and clear above the chaos, already on her knees on the other side of him. “Sedona, don’t move him. Just talk to him.”

“Nick,” I said again. My hands found his, careful, steady despite everything in me that wasn’t steady at all. “I’m here. I’m right here.”

His eyes opened.

I felt the relief move through me so fast it was almost its own kind of pain, his eyes were open, unfocused, blinking against the daylight, but open.

“Mum,” he said slightly above whispers and confusedly.

“I’m he. You fell, bug. Are you okay? Don’t try to move yet.”

“My head hurts. There’s a lot of blood.”

“I know, you’re going to be okay. It is small. Because some part of me had learned, across this entire year, to hold two things at once. Fear and steadiness. Uncertainty and calm. My voice was what he needed most in that moment. Not what I didn’t yet know.

I looked up once, briefly, and found Logan.

He was standing a few feet away, frozen exactly where the collision had left him, and what I saw on his face in that single unguarded second was something I had never once seen from him in three years of marriage and seventeen months of everything that came after.

Not anger. Something closer to shock, raw, complete, the specific look of a man who had spent his entire adult life believing himself the wronged party in every story he’d ever told about his own life, watching that story collapse in real time at the sight of his son’s blood on a public park’s stone table edge.

I didn’t have room to feel anything about that. Not yet. I turned back to Nick.

“Someone’s already called,” my father said, his phone in his hand, his voice steady in the specific way I’d watched him hold steady at my own hospital bedside seventeen months ago. “Ambulance is six minutes out. A woman near the path saw it happen, she called before I even got my phone out.”

13

ThePicnic After

H-hadn’t even thought to wonder whether anyone had called. The world outside the small circle of Nick’s Thand in mine had simply stopped existing for those first seconds.

“Cameron,” my father said.

Cameron was already moving, I registered this peripherally, the way you register things during an emergency, half-present, most of your attention locked entirely on the one thing that mattered. He had Logan by the arm, not violently, just firmly moving him back, putting distance between him and the rest of us with the specific controlled efficiency of a man who had clearly already decided, somewhere in the last sixty seconds, exactly what needed to happen next and in what order.

“Get everyone back,” Cameron said, to no one and everyone. “Give the paramedics room. Mum, stay with Sedona. Dad, with me.”

Dante appeared beside Lake and Drew, both of them frozen at the edge of the scene, both of them staring at Nick with the specific wide-eyed horror of children watching something they didn’t have the framework to process.

Drew’s notebook had fallen somewhere in the grass. Forgotten.

“Come on, his voice was gentle but firm. He gave no room for negotiation in it. “Let’s walk over here.” Dante said, gathering both boys, one arm around each.

You don’t need to watch this part.”

“Is he okay?” Lake’s voice, small, none of his usual narration in it. “Is Nick okay?”

“He’s going to be looked after,” Dante said. “Come on. Let’s walk.”

He carried them, more than walked them, both boys held close against him, moving them toward the far edge of the park where the trees blocked the worst of it from view. I heard Lake start to cry somewhere behind us, the specific frightened sound of a child confronting something too large for him, and I heard Dante’s voice, low and steady, doing exactly what he always did, staying, present, absorbing what he could so the rest of us could focus on what mattered most.

The ambulance arrived in what felt like both six minutes and an entire lifetime.

The paramedics moved fast, professional, the specific competent calm of people who did this constantly and had learned not to let urgency show as panic. They checked Nick carefully, his pupils, his pulse, the wound itself, which one of them pronounced, with careful professional hedging, “looks worse than it probably is, but we’re taking him in regardless, head injuries always get checked properly.”

I rode in the ambulance. I don’t remember being asked if I wanted to. I simply was there, beside the gurney, Nick’s small hand in mine, his eyes drifting open and closed in the specific way that the paramedic kept gently insisting was normal but that terrified me anyway, every single time his eyes closed for longer than a few seconds.

“Stay with me and stay awake for me.”

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