Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 299

Chapter 288. Two Years

SEDONA

Two years have a way of folding itself into something smaller in memory than it actually was.

I was thirty-one now, fully remitted according to Dr. Mitchell’s last three consecutive screenings, ranked sixty-third on the circuit, which Maria insisted on telling people was “remarkable, given the gap” in a tone that suggested she still found my entire comeback slightly miraculous despite having engineered most of it herself.

Nick was eight.

The house Dante had built for us sat on five wooded acres twenty minutes outside Seattle proper, close enough that my mother could “drop by” with a frequency that had become, in practice, almost daily, and far enough that the house genuinely felt like ours rather than an extension of the Preston property.

Dante had designed it with the specific care he brought to everything, a kitchen large enough for my mother’s eventual takeover during holidays.

I stood in the kitchen most mornings now, coffee in hand, looking out at a garden that had become, slowly and without ceremony, simply home.

Nick called Dante “Dad” now.

It had happened gradually. No single dramatic moment. No formal announcement. Just the slow accumulation of an ordinary word slipping naturally into place, across hundreds of unremarkable days.

I remembered the first time I noticed it. Nearly a year ago. Nick is calling out from the garden. Dad, come look at this. Completely unselfconscious. The word arrived as easily as if it had always belonged there.

Dante went very still when he heard it. I watched him from the kitchen window. Watched him kneel down beside Nick to look at whatever bird had prompted the call. He trembled but held himself. A fake smile played on his lips. After sometime he told me later, that night, lying in the dark, that it was the single best moment of his entire life.

I believed him completely.

Drew called me “Mum” now too, with the same gradual, unceremonious arrival, somewhere in the second year, the word had simply started showing up in his careful, precise sentences, no fanfare attached, just the natural evolution of a relationship that had been quietly, steadily, becoming exactly that for years before the language finally caught up.

Two boys. Two parents who had become, through patience and presence rather than any single grand gesture, simply parents to both of them, the careful original architecture of biological versus step entirely beside the point now in the daily texture of actual life.

The wedding planning, when it finally began in earnest, became its own small chaos, because there were, in fact, two weddings being discussed simultaneously, mine and Dante’s, and Cameron and Lucian’s, the latter finally moving forward after Lake’s notebook had spent the better part of a year accumulating tentative outlines” nobody had the heart to discourage.

We sat around my mother’s kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, the whole sprawling assembly of us, trying to sort logistics that had become genuinely complicated given how thoroughly our two families had already merged in practice.

“We could do a joint venue search, Lucian suggested.

“Save everyone the trouble of touring the same properties twice.”

“Absolutely not,” my mother said, with the specific firmness she brought to matters of ceremony. “Two separate, equally important celebrations. I will not have either wedding feel like an afterthought to the other.”

“She’s not wrong,” Cameron said. “Though I appreciate the efficiency argument.”

Lake, now six and somehow even more thorough than he’d been at four, produced an actual binder, color-coded, tabbed, the specific evolution of the notebook he’d started years ago into something genuinely impressive.

“I’ve been tracking venue options for both weddings,” he announced, sliding it across the table. “Cross-referenced by date availability, garden access, and proximity to good bird habitat, since Nick and Drew specifically requested that consideration.”

“You did this,” I said, flipping through pages of careful research that no six-year-old should reasonably have produced.

“I had help,” Lake admitted. “Ms. Okafor showed me how to make a spreadsheet.”

“Your kindergarten teacher taught you spreadsheets,” Lucian said, with visible disbelief.

“First grade now,” Lake corrected, with dignity. “And yes.”

Nick and Drew, settled comfortably at the end of the table, were deep in their own negotiation, the “important jobs” Nick had requested years ago finally being formalized into something they’d apparently been planning for months without telling anyone.

“We want to do the rings,” Nick announced. “Both weddings. We’ve been practicing.”

“Practicing what?” I asked.

Drew paced with a pillow in his hands without dropping anything. He wore an unreadable expression, but somehow, one can deduce something.

“We’ve been using a tennis ball as a stand-in. It is harder than it looked.

“How’s the success rate?” Dante asked, fighting a smile.

“Improving,” Nick said. “We dropped it less this week than last week.”

I sat back and watched the whole noisy, overlapping scene unfold around the table, two weddings being planned simultaneously, a binder produced by a six-year-old, two boys practicing ring-bearing with a tennis ball, my mother already three drafts deep into a guest list she insisted needed “careful curation” despite the guest list essentially being everyone already sitting in this room.

Gameron caught my eye from across the table. He looked, I thought, exactly like a man who had spent two years patiently building toward this exact unremarkable, chaotic, joyful Sunday afternoon, and had finally, completely arrived.

“Two years,” I said to him, quietly, just between us, while the rest of the table continued its happy chaos.

“Two years,” he agreed.

“Did you think we’d get here? Honestly, back at the beginning of all of it?”

He considered this carefully, the way he considered everything.

“I hoped,” he said. “I worked toward it every single day without letting myself fully believe it until it actually arrived. But sitting here now, watching all of this,” he gestured at the table, the binder, the boys negotiating ring-bearing logistics, Lucian and my mother debating venue dates, “I don’t think I could have imagined it would look exactly like this. It’s better than what I imagined. Louder, Messier. More completely, ridiculously full.”

“It is,” I agreed.

I looked around the table one more time, my whole sprawling, hard-won family, gathered loud and overlapping and completely, permanently theirs.

Two years.

It had taken everything to get here. It had been, entirely worth it.

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Chapter 289: Asking Lucian, Officially

CAMERON

I had asked Lucian a number of critical questions six months ago. It wasn’t a kind of quiet kitchen conversation from years back. But I asked the critical questions on bended knee in our own garden. Lake was conspicuously absent for the first time in his life when something significant was happening. I’d finally learned my lesson about the importance of advance notice.

We hadn’t made it formal yet. Not in the sense that mattered to my mother. No announcement. No venue. No date. We’d simply continued living the life we’d already built. The engagement was settling into our days in the same unhurried way everything between us always had. No rush attached, because we’d already proven, across years of patient Tuesdays, that we didn’t need urgency to know what we had was real.

But my mother had started, gently and then less gently, to ask questions.

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