Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 280

Chapter 268: The Cett

LOGAN

The room was a small space, probably around eight feet by ten feet, give or take. I had spent thirty-four years in rooms designed to impress people in order to support me on my ideas and make my company bloom, I had stood in boardrooms with views, gone to restaurants with reservations months out, and I lived in an estate with floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking a skyline I’d once believed I owned simply by virtue of standing above it.

This room had a metal bench bolted to the wall and a light that didn’t turn off.

I had been sober for six hours by the time anyone left me alone long enough to actually sit with it.

This was new. I want to be precise about that, even now, because being left alone in here, there was no performance to give and no one watching who needed the performance.

I had not been fully sober for any meaningful stretch of time in weeks. The whiskey had been doing something for me that I hadn’t examined too closely, keeping the anger fed, keeping the fury at the centre where I could use it instead of feeling whatever sat underneath it.

There was no whiskey here.

There was just the bench, and the light, and the silence of a building designed to hold people who had nowhere left to be except exactly where they’d been put

I tried, at first, to do what I had always done. To build the version of events that left me less exposed, less the aggressor and more of the victim in this case, more wronged than wrong. I only wanted to see Nick, with the whole case, I had not seen him despite being in the same house with him, I was busy then, I had time now.

They wouldn’t let me see my own son. The fight wasn’t mine to start, Dante stepped toward me first, didn’t he? Didn’t he move first?

I sat with that story for a while. It had worked for me my entire life, this skill of redirecting the blame to someone else. I had done it with Sedona for three years.

I had done it with my own father, decades ago, the specific cruelty of a man who never once apologized for anything because I was never at fault.

The story didn’t hold this time.

I kept seeing it. Not the parts I could argue with, not Dante’s face, not Cameron’s hand on my arm, not the anger building up in me raring to strike out at the obstacles keeping me from my family.

I kept seeing Nick.

Running toward his mother. Away from the noise, away from the danger I had created simply by being there, simply by deciding that my own need to assert some last fragment of control mattered more than every careful arrangement built to keep him safe.

713

The Cell

kept hearing the sound.

Claim

Not loud. That was the thing I couldn’t argue away, couldn’t reframe, couldn’t build a story around that made it land any softer than it had actually landed. A small, terrible sound, a child’s body meeting stone, and then the silence after it, the worst silence I had ever heard in my life, my son not moving, not crying, not doing any of the things a frightened child does when he’s only a little bit hurt.

I had caused that.

Not Dante. Not Cameron. Not Sedona, not the custody filing, Me.

I sat on the metal bench. My heart was not at ease. I folded my hands between my knees. The fluorescent light was flat and unforgiving overhead.

For the first time in longer than I could measure, I let myself simply sit inside the thing. Without immediately reaching for the exit.

I did not arrive at forgiveness for myself.

But I sat there, and I let the image stay instead of arguing it away.

Nick. Running. The sound. The stillness after.

My son’s blood on a public park’s stone table edge, and the fact, undeniable now, inescapable, finally landing somewhere I couldn’t redirect it, that whatever I had told myself for a long time about being the wronged party, about protecting what was mine, about a world that simply refused to cooperate with the version of events I had constructed, none of it had ever once been about protecting Nick.

It had only ever been about me.

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