Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 286

Telling Him-2

“Is he going to jail?” Nick asked. Straight at it, the way he goes at things that actually matter.

I didn’t flinch.

Claim

“Probably,” I said. “For a long time, most likely. The people whose job it is to decide that are still figuring it out. But based on what’s already happened, yeah. I think he’s going to be in jail for a big part of your childhood.”

His face did something I didn’t have a single word for. Not quite crying. Something underneath it, almost like relief mixed in there too, the strange, tangled feeling of losing a dad he loved while also, somewhere down deep, finally understanding why the last year had felt so scary and confusing.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. Before he could even ask, before the thought could fully form, because I’d learned the hard way, in my own childhood, in my own marriage, that kids will absorb blame for things that were never theirs, just because nobody ever told them clearly enough, soon enough, that it wasn’t.

“None of this is because of anything you did, or said, or felt. Not the custody stuff, not the picnic, none of it. You didn’t cause any of this. Your dad made choices, bad, serious, harmful choices, and now he has to deal with what comes after them. That’s between him and the consequences of his own decisions. It was not for one second, about you.”

“But he loves me,” Nick said. Quiet. Almost a question, even though it wasn’t said like one.

“I think he does,” I said carefully. “In whatever way he actually knows how to. I don’t think it’s right to say he says he never loved you. That is not true. And it wouldn’t be fair to say it just to make this easier. But loving someone and actually knowing how to take care of them safely, those are two different things. Your dad never figured out the second one. But it is the truth that he was responsible for the problem you had. Both things can be true at the same time.”

He sat with that, looking down at the half-finished Lego thing in front of him.

“Can both things be true at the same time a lot? Like, with other stuff too?”

“More than you’d think, most of the really hard things in life are like that. Not all good, not all bad. Just messy, true in two directions at once.”

“Am I gonna see him again?”

I’d been bracing for this one, too. I still didn’t have a clean answer.

“I don’t know yet. I’m not gonna promise you something I can’t actually be sure of. Someday, after he’s gone through whatever consequences come from what he did. And if it’s safe, really safe, for you, not just convenient for him, there might be a way for you to see him again. If that’s something you want. We’d figure that out together when that time comes. Nobody’s gonna force you into it. And nobody’s gonna keep you from it either, once it’s actually safe. But that’s a long way off. I don’t want you spending the next bunch of years just waiting on it. I want you to spend them being a regular kid. Here. Safe. With people who love you the whole way.”

He nodded slowly. He didn’t fully cry, though his eyes were wet. His face. was not bright. It does appear he was holding something back in his mind.

12

Telling Him.

Clam

“Can I keep building? I think I need my hands doing something while I think about this.”

“Of course.”

He went back to the pieces, quieter than before. Less absorbed, more deliberate, the small, steady motions of a kid working something enormous through his hands because his words weren’t ready for it

yet.

I sat with him without disturbing or distracting his attention. Exactly the same way Dante did once with

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