Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 297

Chapter 284. Lake’s Question.

LUCIAN

It came on a Tuesday evening. Which felt appropriate.

Lake had been in bed for twenty minutes. In theory. In practice, he was lying in the dark doing what he always did before sleep came. Narrating things quietly. Working through whatever the day had left unfinished. Occasionally remembering something important that required him to call out to me in the hallway.

I was passing his door when he said, “Dad.”

“Yes,” I said, pushing it open.

He was on his back, looking at the ceiling, the star nightlight sending its familiar scatter across the room. He had the expression he used when he’d been thinking about something for a while and had finally decided the thinking was done and the asking should begin.

“Is Cameron going to be my dad?” he said. “For real. With paperwork.”

I came in and sat on the edge of his bed. The way I always did when Lake had a question that deserved to be answered from close up, not from the doorway.

“What do you mean by for real?” I asked.

“I mean official,” he said. “Like how Nick is official with Sedona now. The judge did paperwork, and then it was real in the way that nobody could change it.” He turned his head to look at me. “I want to know if Cameron is going to be my dad the same way. With the paperwork that makes it so nobody can change it.”

I looked at him for a moment.

Six months ago, Lake would not have asked this question. Not because he hadn’t had the capacity for it, Lake had always had the capacity for most things, the capability arriving significantly ahead of the willingness, but because asking it would have required him to name something he wanted, out loud, directly, in a way that could be heard and potentially not answered in the way he hoped

Lake, for a long time, had been careful about what he named out loud.

I thought about the version of him from the early Tuesdays, the polite, precise, carefully distant four-year-old who had deployed good manners like armour and had held his conclusions about Cameron at the back of his chest, unspoken, for months before he’d allowed any of them to surface. The version who had told Cameron to his face I don’t like you still, and then, in the same conversation, claimed his parents as grandparents with the confidence of someone who’d decided to stop protecting himself and start simply wanting things.

That had been the beginning of this version. The version currently lying in his bed, looking at his ceiling, asking a direct question about paperwork and permanence without any apparent fear of the answer.

“Cameron and I are going to get married,” I said. “You know that. We’ve talked about it.”

"I know,” Lake said. “But that’s you and Cameron getting married. I want to know if that makes him my dad. With the dad paperwork.”

“What kind of paperwork do you think Dad’s paperwork is?” I asked

Lake considered this. “The kind that’s in a file,” he said. “That someone keeps somewhere official. That says: this person is this other person’s dad, and it can’t be undone just because someone decides they want it to be different.”

I sat with the question properly, because it deserved a proper answer rather than a comfortable one.

The honest answer was: I didn’t know exactly what the legal shape of it looked like yet. Cameron and I had talked about it in the broad sense, the way we talked about most things, thoroughly, in advance, both of us having enough of a preference for preparation that we rarely arrived at important conversations without having circled them privately first. We had talked about what marriage meant for Lake’s legal status, what adoption looked like in practice, what Lake himself would want, and when and how.

We hadn’t finished those conversations. We had, I suppose, been waiting to have them properly until we were married and the ground was solid enough to build on. But Lake was asking now. Tonight. On a Tuesday. Because that was how Lake worked. His questions came when they were ready. Not when the adults around him were ready to answer them.

“I don’t have the full answer yet. Cameron and I are still figuring out the details. What the paperwork looks like. When. How it happens. But I can tell you the thing that actually matters underneath the question.”

“What?” Lake said.”

“Cameron is going to be your dad,” I said. “In every sense that actually counts. He already is, in most of them. The paperwork is the formal version of something that’s already true; it’s not what makes it real, it just makes it official in the way you’re describing. And yes, that official part is coming. I promise you that.”

Lake was quiet for a moment, processing this with the thoroughness he gave to things he’d been waiting to hear.

“Okay,” he said, finally.

“Okay?” I said.

“That’s enough information for now,” he said. “I can work with that.”

I sat there for another moment, just looking at him, his small, certain face, the star nightlight’s scatter across the ceiling, the absolute calm of a child who had asked for what he wanted and received an honest answer and found it sufficient.

“Lake,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’m happy that you asked. It’s not always easy to ask for the things you actually want.”

He considered this.

“It used to be harder,” he said, with the matter-of-fact accuracy he brought to self-observation. “I didn’t use to ask things like that. I used to just wait and see what happened.”

"I know,” I said. “What changed?”

He thought about it seriously, the way he thought about everything that deserved seriousness.

“Cameron kept coming. Even when it wasn’t easy. And I decided that if he kept coming to me. I would start saying the things I actually wanted to say. Instead of waiting to find out if I was going to get them.” He looked at the ceiling. “It’s more efficient.”

I kissed his forehead and stood up.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify