Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 288

Asking

Chapter 275. Asking.

DANTE

We had stopped calling it anything months ago, which I’d noticed without saying anything about it. Not because the absence of a name bothered me, I’d never needed labels the way some people seemed to.

I’d needed proximity. I’d needed steadiness. I’d needed to keep showing up, the way I’d kept showing up for fifteen years of six a.m. sessions, regardless of whether anyone was watching to confirm it counted.

But somewhere in the last few weeks, in the ordinary texture of a life that had quietly become shared, Nick and Drew’s homework spread across the same kitchen table, my toothbrush sitting in the cup beside hers without either of us discussing how it had gotten there, the easy domestic rhythm of two households that had simply, gradually, stopped being two, I’d started noticing the gap where a name should have been.

I found her in the back garden on a Thursday evening, the kids inside finishing dinner under Jennifer’s supervision, the specific rare quiet of fifteen unscheduled minutes neither of us usually got.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

She looked up from the chair she’d settled into. The late light caught her face always.

I sat down across from her. Took my time with it. The question was simple. I still didn’t want to rush it.

“We’ve been calling this ‘figuring it out’ for a long time. Both of us. I think we started calling it that because we needed the room. The case, the hearing, Nick, everything that was actually urgent enough to need all of our attention. I understood that. I never minded giving it the room it needed.”

“But,” she said. Gentle. Already reading where this was going, the way she always read me.

“But I don’t think we’re figuring it out anymore,” I said. “I think we figured it out a while back, somewhere in all of it, and we just haven’t said so out loud yet.” I held her eyes.

“I’m not asking for anything dramatic. And I guess I won’t be ready to beg. Not today, and for this matter. Though I’m not ruling it out in the future.”

I’m just asking if you’d want to start calling this something. Putting a name on it, instead of letting it stay this open, undefined thing we’ve both just been quietly living inside of.

She was quiet for a moment. I knew that look by now. It wasn’t hesitation. It was just her being careful, the way she was careful with anything that actually mattered.

“What would you want to call it?” she said.

“Partner,” I said. “If that word still means something to you, given everything it’s carried for you before. Or something else entirely, if you’d rather build a new word for it that doesn’t have any of that history attached.” I reached for her hand.

“I just want to stop introducing you to people with some vague, careful phrase. The kind that dances around what you actually are to me. I want to say it plainly.”

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Asking

Claims

Iwant Nick to hear it plainly when he’s ready to. want Drew to hear it plainly too, though I think he’s been operating under the assumption it was already settled for a while now.”

She laughed, soft, the real version. “He probably has a chart somewhere.”

“He might,” I said. “He’s very thorough.”

“Yes,” she said.

Simple, no hesitation. The kind of yes that told me she’d already arrived at this answer privately, somewhere in the quiet accumulation of these past months. She was simply waiting for a chance to catch up to get her pre-determined position.

“Partner,” she said, trying the word out loud. Testing its shape.

“I think I like that. And I believe it’s the right word. Without erasing what came before, building something new that will take up future challenges, that might come.

I leaned forward and kissed her, slow, unhurried, the patience of a man who had waited fifteen years without realizing he was waiting for exactly this, and finally having it all without any doubts.

We told the kids over dessert, because there didn’t seem to be any reason to make it more formal than the

moment actually was.

“Dante and I have decided to call ourselves partners,” Sedóna said, simply, between bites of the cobbler Jennifer had made. “Officially. Out loud.”

Nick looked up first. “Like, partner? Or just a regular partner?”

“Partner or boyfriend and girlfriend,” Sedona said, smiling.

“Okay,” Nick said, and went back to his cobbler, the particular easy acceptance of a child who’d had enough time and enough steady proof to simply trust that good news was, in fact, good news, and didn’t need to be interrogated further.

Drew, however, set down his spoon entirely.

“I knew it, he said calmly. But there was this quiet satisfaction on his face. And the tone he used when one was not sure of what he or she was saying.

“You knew it?” I said.

“You’ve had a toothbrush at Sedona’s house for two months,” Drew said, with the careful precision he brought to everything. “And Sedona started keeping the soup recipe in your handwriting in her recipe folder, which I noticed because I help with the grocery list sometimes. Those are both indicators of a settled domestic arrangement.” He picked his spoon back up. “I just didn’t know if you’d talked about it formally yet, but I figured you would eventually.”

Sedona and I looked at each other across the table.

“Domestic arrangement,” I repeated.

“It’s the technical term,” Drew said, entirely serious.

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