Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 287

Chapter 274. Free Fatt

CATHERINE

Claim

The Hayes Industries publicist called me on a Wednesday, polite and brief, the specific brevity reserved for people whose continued association was no longer considered useful.

“We’re updating our roster of brand-affiliated individuals,” she said. “Given recent developments, the firm feels it’s best to part ways with anyone whose name has been closely linked to the family in public materials. We’ll send a formal notice through your agent. This is just a courtesy call.”

“I haven’t been Logan’s partner in any official capacity,” I said. “I never married him. There’s no contract tying me to..”

“I understand. I just wanted you to hear it directly rather than through your agent. Thank you for your understanding.” Her tone was more like someone who had already finished the conversation in her own head before it started.

She hung up before I’d fully understood anything. Sherry stopped taking my calls the same week.

I told myself, at first, that she was simply overwhelmed, the police questioning, all those was pressing down on her, I understood that, so I left three messages. Warm and careful ones. The same register I’d used on her for three years. The maternal-adjacent warmth that had always gotten me exactly what I needed from her. Until now.

She never called back.

I understood, eventually, what this meant. Sherry had been the easiest person in this entire structure to manage, because she had wanted, desperately, to believe the version of events that kept her son blameless and herself comfortable in that belief.

Now that the comfortable version had collapsed completely, she no longer needed me to help her maintain it. I had been useful exactly as long as the fiction held. The fiction didn’t hold anymore.

The invitational sponsors were more careful about it, which somehow made it worse.

Nothing direct. No phone call like the publicist’s, no formal notice. Just a series of small omissions that accumulated into something unmistakable, my name quietly absent from a press release I’d been told weeks ago I’d be featured in. A sponsorship renewal conversation that kept getting “pushed to next quarter.” An event invitation that simply never arrived, the kind I’d received automatically for the past four years without ever once having to ask.

I called my agent.

“They’re nervous about the proximity,” she said, careful, clearly choosing her words with more caution than she usually bothered with on calls with me. “Not about anything you did directly. Just, your name’s been in some of the coverage. The Hayes situation. Sponsors don’t love volatility right now, even volatility that isn’t technically yours.”

“None of this is mine,” I said.

13

< Free Fall

+know. Fjust told you what they told me.”

Clas

+ called Alina that evening. Alina had always told me the truth even when it cost her something. I wanted

somebody to confirm my position.

“Be honest with me.”

About Dante. Is there still a path there. Has enough time passed? Once the dust settles on all of this?”

There was a long silence on her end. Longer than I’d expected.

“Catherine,” she said finally. “I need you to actually hear me this time: Not just listen until I’m done talking and then do whatever you’d already decided to do.”

“I’m listening.”

“Dante Wells is publicly, visibly with Sedona Preston,” Alina said. “Not quietly, not as some private arrangement you could still find an angle into. They were photographed together at her last match, sitting courtside, his hand on her shoulder, completely unguarded. There were articles about it within hours, not the ugly kind, the kind people actually root for. A recovery story. A comeback story. A man who survived an attack ordered by her ex-husband, standing by her through all of it.” She paused. “If you tried anything now any version of reaching toward him, it wouldn’t just fail, Catherine. It would read as exactly what it actually is. Predatory. Opportunistic. You’d be the woman who tried to insert herself into a survival story for her own benefit, right when the public is primed to root against anyone who looks like they’re circling that family for advantage.”

“I wasn’t trying to…”

“You were finally flat, Alina said. “We both know you were. I’m not judging you for it, not entirely, you were managing risk the only way you know how, hedging against a collapse you could see coming. But the hedge is dead now. It’s not just unavailable. It’s actively dangerous to even gesture toward. Catherine, that door isn’t just closed. It burns you if you touch it.

I sat with that for a long moment. The phone warm against my ear. The apartment silent around me in a way it had never quite been silent before.

“What do I do,” I said finally. Quieter than I meant to sound.

“Catherine, I don’t know. Believe you me I genuinely don’t know. And that’s not me being unkind. “Alina said.

“You’ve spent years building your position around being indispensable to whichever man came out standing. That strategy assumed there would always be a man standing. Right now, there isn’t one. Logan’s facing decades. Dante’s unavailable and would be even if he weren’t already taken, nobody wants the woman who tried to manage two fronts at once while a child was in danger. You burned the article bridge with Sedona’s team, and that’s traceable, whether or not it’s ever formally proven.” A pause.

“I think the question isn’t what you do next. I think the question is who you actually are, underneath all the positioning, once there’s nobody left to position yourself around.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

I sat alone in my apartment that night, properly alone, in a way I realized, turning it over, I had not actually

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