She Was Never Just the Billionaire’s Wife (Natasha and Chase) novel Chapter 213

(Sonia)

I sit on the floor for an hour after I hang up with my mother.

Then I do the thing I’ve been putting off for months.

I call Nathanial.

The phone rings seven times.

Just when I’m sure he’s going to let it go to voicemail, he picks up.

"Sonia."

His voice is the same and not the same. Same baritone. Different weather.

"Hi."

He doesn’t say anything, waiting for me to explain why I’m calling.

"I'm coming home."

"That’s nice."

Cold enough to give me frostbite.

"Mom called me. She told me everything. About Will's father. Why she left."

"I don’t suppose you care much. You never knew any of them."

"Right. Of course."

I don't know what I expected.

A how are you?

An are you all right?

Something.

Surely he should have thawed a little in the time I’ve been gone. Maybe even missed me some.

He doesn't give me anything.

He’s decided in advance what this call is going to be, and he’s sticking to that.

I decide to try and lighten the tension with a joke.

"So I'm Natasha's aunt now, technically. Which means I'm the mature one, I guess."

Silence.

"That was a joke."

"I couldn’t tell."

"It was supposed to be funny."

"It wasn't."

I close my eyes.

I try a different tack. The one I’ve been trying to convince myself would work.

The we're in this together tack.

"Nathanial. It's a lot. For both of us. I just thought we could..."

"Could what, Sonia?"

"Talk. About it. About what it's like to find out the man we thought was our father-"

"Sonia. Stop."

"I'm just saying, mom lied to both of us and we could be there-"

"Stop talking."

I stop.

He doesn't speak for a few seconds.

When he does, his voice is steady in the way it gets when he’s about to say something he’s been bottling up for a long time.

"For as long as you’ve been alive, you’ve never lost anyone. Not a single week of your life has been genuinely hard. You’ve been at the top of every room you’ve ever walked into, bolstered by money, since before you could speak.”

He takes a ragged breath before plunging on mercilessly.

“Will didn't exist for you because you never knew him. You never met any of them. Not Nathanial Sr, not our grandmother, who I can’t call that anymore, because of what she did.”

Wow. The venom in his voice could strip paint from metal.

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