Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 285

Chapter 273: Telling Him

SEDONA

Clam

I’d been putting it off for four days. Adaeze finally said something about the whole thing on the phone.

“He’s going to hear about it,” she said. “Not the whole case, I doubt six-year-old’s classmates are tracking a financial trail. But the arrest, the picnic, some version of it that’s gotten garbled by the time it reaches him. Kids talk. Adults forget kids are listening half the time. Better he hears the true version from you, in words he can actually hold onto, than a wrong version from someone at school pickup who got it third-hand.”

I knew she was right. I’d just been waiting to get ready for it, and somewhere around day three, I started suspecting that version of me wasn’t going to show up on her own. Some conversations you just have before you’re ready. The waiting costs more than the doing does.

I picked a Sunday afternoon. Quiet house, no Lake or Drew underfoot for once, my parents taking a deliberately long walk so it would just be the two of us at the kitchen table.

Nick was building something out of his new Lego set. He gave it the usual attention he brought to everything. I waited for him patiently to finish what he was doing before we talked.

As soon as he looked up, I walked to him. Nick, I need to talk to you about something important. Can you put that down for a sec?”

He set the piece down. Something in his face went still, He was not scared exactly, but just alert. He showed the readiness of a kid who’d learned how to attend to important things from the beginning. He knows when something is about to shift under his feet.

“Is it about Dad?” he said.

“Yeah, it is.”

“You haven’t talked to him since the park. And you’re not going to, for a while. I will be honest to you in telling why you don’t need to talk with him. I believe you deserve to know the truth rather than you deserve being protected from it.’

He nodded slowly.

ľ

“Your dad is in trouble. Serious trouble. Some of it’s from what happened at the picnic, he wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. What he started that day, the way you got hurt, that happened because of the choices he made. That’s part of why he can’t see you right now,” I said.

“He didn’t push me. It was an accident,” Nick said quickly. Almost defensive.

“You’re right. He didn’t touch you directly. But he showed up somewhere he wasn’t allowed to be. He started something he shouldn’t have started. And because of that, you got hurt. Sometimes people don’t have to mean to cause harm for it to still be their fault,” I said.

He thought about that the way he thought about everything. Slow. Careful. Turning it over before he committed to an answer.

1/2

Telling

Clam

Just like if you throw a ball in the house when you were asked not to, and the ball breaks a vase. You never intended to break the vase. But that did take away that you broke the vase.

“That’s exactly it, I said Something in me ached a little. At how fast he found that. How much practice he’d already had at understanding things that weren’t fair but were still real.”

“Except that what your dad did is a lot more serious than a thrown ball. There’s more to it than just the picnic.”

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