Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 310

Chapter 302. What She Built.

SEDONA

The game had stopped resembling tennis approximately twenty minutes ago.

I wasn’t sure exactly when it had crossed the line, somewhere between Lake introducing a rule about what happened when the ball hit the net post, and Drew adding a counter-rule that Lake immediately challenged on and Nick attempting to moderate a disagreement he’d partially caused by agreeing to both rules simultaneously.

I watched from the garden bench and didn’t say anything.

Dante sat beside me. His shoulder against mine. Neither of us is talking. I had been thinking, across the past few weeks of how far one person could travel across the length of a single life. And what that traveling actually costs, and what it has built.

There had been a girl who left a marriage because staying would have cost her more than she had left to spend. She’d built an identity out of necessity, a name, a story, a version of herself that could exist in a city that didn’t know her original shape.

She’d done what people did when they had nothing else to work with. She’d survived. She called the survival something more dignified than that, because dignity was one thing nobody could take without your permission.

There had been a woman who stood alone in a hospital waiting room. With news too large for the room she was in. The phone calls the woman was waiting for never came.

There had been a mother who spent months fighting her way back to a boy. A boy who kept a constellation on his ceiling and wrote her a letter with an orange sun in the corner.

There had been a player who stood on a court in Chicago, mid-follow-through, looking exactly like what she was.

All of those women were me. I didn’t need to disown any of them to be who I was now. They were all part of the building, the foundation and the scaffolding and the walls that had come down and been rebuilt stronger.

“Lake is trying to introduce a five-point penalty system,” Dante said quietly, watching the court.

“I see that,” I said.

“Nick is going to agree to it.”

“He always agrees to Lake’s systems,” I said. “He thinks it’s easier than arguing.”

“Drew knows it’s not easier,” Dante said. “He’s already calculating the downstream consequences.”

“He always is,” I said.

We watched Drew say something to Nick, who immediately revised his position on the penalty system, causing Lake to begin an appeal process that apparently required him to also serve as his own judge.

Ordinary. Completely, deeply ordinary.

I had spent so long in the extraordinary, the crisis, the danger, that ordinary had seemed, for a long time, like a destination I might not be allowed to reach.

Something for other people, steadier people, people whose lives hadn’t been pulled apart and reconstructed so many times that the seams were visible if you looked closely.

The baby moved. I put my hand on my stomach swiftly, the way I did now whenever she shifted, the instinct of someone who had been waiting to meet this particular person for months and greeted every reminder of her presence with something that lived between joy and pure amazement.

Dante put his hand over mine without being asked. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the court. At the boys. In the evening, the light moves across the garden. But his hand stayed where it was, warm and present, the specific settled weight of someone who was exactly where he intended to be.

I thought about the glowing stars. Gerald the Boot in the corner of Nick’s ceiling, thirty-three years old, and carefully relocated across two cities.

The Return in the middle, penciled in a six-year-old’s handwriting on a folded piece of paper that had travelled in my bag for months before it became real. The Whole Time at the top, the one we’d made together on a Saturday afternoon with no clock running out on us.

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