Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 284

Chapter 272: The New House

NICK

I had a room now. A real one, not a guest room I borrowed for two hours,an actual room with my own stuff in it, and a desk by the window, and the new star nightlight that Mum got to match the one back at Dad’s

house.

I was still getting used to that part. The “actual room” part.

It was loud here. Not bad loud, good loud, mostly, the kind where you could hear people in other parts of the house doing their own things, and it made the whole place feel full instead of empty. Grandma Jennifer was always in the kitchen. Grandpa Parker read in the sitting room with his door a little open, which Mum told me was his way of saying, “Come find me if you want to.”

And Lake and Drew were there.

Not every day, but enough days that I’d stopped keeping track of which day it was going to be. They lived close by, with Lucian and Dante, and they came over so often that it had basically stopped being a special thing and started being a normal thing, which was weird because for a long time I’d thought Drew specifically being around was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I won’t pretend I didn’t, but I still felt something weird about it sometimes.

There were still moments where the old feeling poked its head up again. Like watching Drew know exactly where the good snacks were kept without having to ask. Or hearing Lake call Grandpa Parker “Grandpa Parker” with zero hesitation, while I’d only just gotten comfortable doing the same thing myself.

The feeling that says he gets to just live here, and you only got here because of an emergency.

But it poked up less than it used to. That was the part I was still figuring out how to explain, even to myself. Being here every day instead of two hours every few weeks changed the math somehow. It wasn’t a math I could write down. It just felt different, having breakfast across the table from Drew on an ordinary Tuesday instead of meeting him once in a waiting room and spending two weeks turning it into a whole disaster in my head.

The day it actually changed started with a bird.

I was in the back garden by myself, looking at the hydrangea Grandpa Parker had shown me; it had real buds on it now, tiny green ones, proof the stems hadn’t been lying about not being dead, when Drew came out with his notebook.

He just crouched down near the fence. Looking at something in the bushes.

“What is it?” I said.

“Shh,” he said. Not rude. Just focused. “Cedar waxwing. Don’t move too fast.”

I was down next to him. And I was carefully watching.

I saw it then.

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The New Home

Chaim

just thought about him as Drew. The kid who knew everything about birds. Who didn’t make me feel dumb for not knowing as much? Who let me hold his actual notebook even though I could tell it mattered a lot to him. Who said “friendly competition” in this super serious voice that made me want to laugh.

I thought maybe I actually liked him. Not because Mum was with his dad, not because we were stuck together at every family thing now, whether we liked it or not.

Just because he was the kind of person I’d want to be friends with anyway, if I’d met him some totally different way.

At lunch, Lake announced, loudly, the way Lake announced basically everything, that he had reorganized the bookshelf in the sitting room again, this time by “colour and also feelings,” whatever that meant, and that nobody was allowed to mess it up.

“What if a book has sad feelings but is also blue?” Drew asked, completely serious.

Lake considered it like it was a real emergency. “That’s a problem I’m still solving.”

I laughed so hard I almost choked on my sandwich, and Drew laughed too, and across the table Mum looked over at me with this expression I couldn’t totally read, happy, maybe, or something bigger than happy, the kind of look she got sometimes that made me feel like she was thinking about something from a long time ago.

No question, I just ate my lunch. Sitting at a real table. In a real house. With people who felt less and less like “Mum’s new family” every single day, and more and more like just my family.

All of it. Even Drew.

Especially Drew, maybe.

I still had the constellation that was only mine and Mum’s. Nobody could take that. But I was starting to understand something new, too, that having more people who showed up for me didn’t mean less of anything for me.

It just meant more.

a/n: i hope i was able to pull off the kid’s tone and reasoning, formally i had been told i write their pov as if they are an adult with adult reasoning,

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The New House

“That’s so weird-looking, in a good way.”

“I know, I’ve only seen two before. This is the best view I’ve gotten,” Drew whispered back.

We watched it for almost five-whole minutes before it flew off. Drew showed me his notes when he finished.

“You’re really good at that.”

“I practice a lot.” Not bragging. Just telling me a fact, the same way he told me everything.

“Can I see the other ones?” I asked. “In your notebook. The other birds.”

He looked at me like he was deciding something. Then he just handed it over.

Glaum

I went through page after page, hadada ibis, the one Lake always talked about. A heron. Something called

a varied thrush that I remembered him sending a photo of months ago, back when I didn’t even fully know who he was yet, just a name attached to a picture, with for your records written underneath it.

“You sent me this one,” I said. “Before. When I first started my own list.”

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