Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 309

Chapter 301. The Whole Crew.

RACHEL

Molly had opinions about everything now, which was either a developmental milestone or a personality trait, and I’d stopped trying to determine which.

She arrived at the Preston Garden that Saturday with the specific purposeful energy of a two-year-old who had been here before and considered herself a regular. She went directly to find Lake, because Lake was her favorite person at these gatherings and she had never once pretended otherwise, and Lake received her arrival with the gravity he extended to all important things.

“Hello,” he said.

“HELLO,” she said, at approximately twice the necessary volume.

“I see you,” he confirmed.

“LAKE,” she said, apparently finding his name significant enough to announce.

“Yes,” he said.

They stood looking at each other with the mutual recognition of two people who had, through some accident of family logistics, found exactly the kind of friend they were looking for.

I put Enzo Junior on the blanket my mother-in-law had spread on the grass, handed Enzo a drink, and stood for a moment simply looking at the whole picture of it.

There were a lot of people.

I had known this family for seventeen years, through every version of itself, and I still sometimes needed a moment to just stand back and count.

Jennifer was at the food table, which was less a table and more a full catering operation at this point. Parker was in the garden, showing Nick something near the rose bed while Drew stood nearby, taking notes with the focused seriousness he brought to everything Parker said. Cameron and Lucian by the back fence, talking about something that had the specific texture of a comfortable argument, not conflict, just two people who were interested in disagreeing about something because they’d been together long enough that disagreement was its own kind of closeness.

Sedona on the garden bench, visibly pregnant now, watching the boys with the easy, complete contentment of a woman who had stopped waiting for the floor to fall out and was simply sitting in her own life.

Dante was beside her, one hand resting on her back, not even conscious of the gesture anymore, just where his hand went when she was near

Lake and Molly had apparently already established a game that involved the frisbee and rules nobody else was invited to understand.

I had known Sedona since we were fifteen.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I don’t think I do often enough, the actual length of that sentence, what it contains.

I had known her before Logan. Before the diagnosis. Before the custody case, the stalking complaint, and a parking lot at six in the morning, a school gate in December, and all the rest of it. I had known her when she was a girl who was already carrying more than she should have had to carry, who had already learned the specific skill of making herself seem fine when she wasn’t, who had already built so many walls around the parts of herself she was afraid were too much for anyone to stay for

That phone call was the worst moment of my friendship with her. Not because of what Cameron said, though that was terrible, but because of the realization that came with it. That I had missed it. That I had been so close, across all those years, and had still somehow missed how bad it had gotten.

She looked up across the garden and found me watching her, and smiled.

I smiled back.

Seventeen years. From a school corridor to this garden. From a girl who didn’t know yet how much she would have to survive to a woman sitting in the sun, pregnant, married, healthy, surrounded by every person she’d ever needed and finally, fully in possession of all of them

“She looks good,” Enzo said, appearing beside me with his drink, following my eyeline.

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