Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 307

Chapter 299. Her Hands Full.

JENNIFER

Sunday breakfast for nine people had stopped feeling like an occasion somewhere around month four of it happening every week without fail.

I noticed this on a morning in April while I was cracking eggs. Nine had become the number the way four had once been the number, years ago, when it was just me and Parker and

Cameron and Sedona and a smaller kitchen in a different season of our lives.

The number had grown. I hadn’t noticed it growing until it had simply arrived at this.

Nick was at the table already, telling Parker something about a bird he and Drew had identified on Friday, using the correct Latin name with the confidence of someone who had checked it twice before deploying it. Parker was listening with the full, unhurried attention he gave to grandchildren discussing things they’d learned, not performing interest, just actually interested, in the way he’d always been interested in people who knew something and wanted to share it.

Lake was in his chair. The chair that was simply his now, chosen and claimed without negotiation, occupied every Sunday morning as a matter of settled fact.

Drew was beside him, notebook already out, apparently having recorded something worth writing down before breakfast had even fully begun.

Molly was at the end of the table with her cup of milk, occasionally announcing things to nobody in particular. She had started talking in full sentences recently, which was less a developmental milestone and more a personality completion; she had always had opinions, and now she simply had the language to deliver them at the same volume Lake had been delivering his for years.

Enzo Junior slept in the portable seat we kept in the corner, unbothered by all of it.

Sedona came in from the garden at eight-thirty, moving more slowly these days, the pregnancy making everything a little more deliberate. Dante was behind her, his hand briefly at her back as she came through the door.

She sat down and looked at the kitchen, all of it, the whole noisy Sunday morning of it, with the expression she’d been wearing for two years now that I had never fully gotten used to, not because it was rare but because of what it had replaced.

She looked like herself. Completely, simply, herself. I had watched that expression disappear, slowly, across six years of her marriage, replaced by something flatter and more managed, something that performed happiness from the outside rather than feeling it from the inside. I had told myself, at the time, that it was simply the particular texture of her adult life, that people changed when they settled into marriages and careers and the ordinary weight of grown-up responsibility.

I had been wrong. I had been wrong, and I hadn’t let myself see it, and I carried that, quietly, as the one piece of this entire story I didn’t fully lay down, because I thought I should carry it. Because I had been her mother, and I had missed it.

But she was here now.

And she looked like herself.

I considered that sufficient grace.

Parker came in from the garden at half past nine, dirt on his boots despite the doormat, which I had long since stopped commenting on because some things simply were what they were.

He stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at the table the way he sometimes did when he thought nobody was watching, the specific quiet accounting of a man adding up everything in a room and finding it good.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify