Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 97

<Being Told Abovitogan

“From Chicago.”

“That’s my assumption. He didn’t say specifically, but-yes. Chicago.”

Claim

I nodded slowly. Looked at the window. Looked at the ceiling. I looked back at my brother’s face, which was carrying the careful neutrality of someone who had an opinion that he wanted to state but knew better than to state it at this particular moment and was disciplining himself not to lead with it.

“What did you tell him?” I asked. “Beyond that you’d ask me.”`.

“I told him not to come to the hospital unannounced.” Cameron’s jaw shifted slightly. “I told him if he showed up without warning I’d have him removed before he got near your room.”

“Good.”

“And I told him that the answer might be nothing. That you might want no contact at all and that he needed to respect that before I’d agree to pass anything along.”

“Did he say he would?”

“He said yes.” A pause. “He sounded-” Cameron stopped, chose a different word. “He sounded different from what I expected, from the asshole that I had met months ago with his fucking mistress. I expected anger or entitlement, some version of I’m her husband and I have a right to know where she is. I didn’t get that from him which made it more difficult because I had to actually listen to his entire conversation because I had no reason to justify ending the call on a whim.”

“What did you get instead?”

Cameron looked at his hands. “Someone who’d figured out they’d been wrong about something they assumed they were right about for a long time. He figured out that he had been specifically wrong about this and not just generally. Someone who’d done the accounting and come up with a number they couldn’t rationalize and couldn’t defend so the only thing left was to take responsibility for it.” He looked up. “I’m not saying that changes anything. I’m not saying it should. I’m just telling you what I heard.”

I was quiet for a moment.

Outside, Seattle was going into its evening routine-the particular darkening of a Pacific Northwest sky, the clouds doing the thing they did here where they didn’t so much arrive as deepen, as if the gray had always been there and was only now making itself visible.

“He can’t come here,” I said.

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