Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 290

Chapter 277: The Fult Ruling

SEDONA

Adaeze called on a Tuesday morning, and I knew before she said a word that this was the call, the call that changed everything.

“The ruling came through,” she said. “It’s done, Sedona.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Primary custody, granted to you, full and unrestricted,” Adaeze said. “Given everything, the documented pattern, the picnic incident, the criminal charges now formally filed, the judge didn’t find this a close call. I want you to understand that clearly. This wasn’t decided by a narrow margin. It wasn’t a careful weighing of competing arguments that happened to land in your favour. The evidence simply made any other outcome impossible to justify.”

I closed my eyes.

“Logan’s visitation rights are suspended pending the criminal proceedings,” she continued. “Given his current custody status and the charges he’s facing, that’s likely to remain the case for a very long time, possibly permanently, depending on how the criminal trial resolves. He didn’t contest the custody ruling, by the way – his attorney filed no opposition.”

“He didn’t fight it,” I said. Not quite a question.

“There was nothing left for him to fight with,” Adaeze said.

“He’s sitting in a cell facing decades on the criminal charges. A custody dispute over supervised visitation rights probably doesn’t register as a battle worth spending resources on anymore, not against that backdrop.” A pause, softer now. “It’s over, Sedona. Not the criminal case, that still has a long road ahead of it. But this part, the part that’s been governing your life and Nick’s for over a year now, it’s finished. You won. Completely.”

I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

I had imagined this call so many times over the past seven months. I’d built a whole picture around what I expected to feel when it finally arrived. The explosive relief. The kind of victory that demanded celebration.

“Thank you,” I said. “For all of it. Every single piece of this, from the very beginning.”

“You did the actual work,” Adaeze said. “I …just built the case around what was already true.”

I sat at the table after we hung up. The phone is still in my hand. I let myself simply feel it without performing anything for anyone.

This was the thing I hadn’t expected. After seven months of fighting,careful filings, supervised visits, and a public park where everything had nearly fallen apart completely, the moment it finally landed didn’t feel like a finish line crossed in triumph.

Lexhaled.

It had been braced, in some small permanent way, for over a year. Braced for the next motion, the next escalation, the next phone call that might bring devastating news instead of good.

Clam

I had built an entire internal architecture around vigilance, the same way Drew had built his around watching for the bad parts at Dante’s matches, and now, sitting in this quiet kitchen with the ruling finally settled, I understood that the architecture could finally, slowly, start coming down.

I didn’t need to brace anymore.

I went to find Nick.

He was in the back garden with Lake and Drew, the three of them deep in some elaborate game involving the hydrangea and a system of rules I didn’t fully understand and didn’t need to.

I watched him for a moment before calling his name. His easy laugh. I keenly watched the way he moved now. It is very different from the usual cautious child I’d held in a family services office all those months ago.

“Nick, can you come here for a moment?”

He came. He was slightly out of breath. His face was open and curious.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Nick lives here now,” I said. “Officially. Forever.”

Lake considered this with his usual gravity. “He already lived here.”

“Now it’s permanent,” I said. “Official.”

“Oh,” Lake said, satisfied, as though this minor legal distinction had simply confirmed something he’d already privately decided months ago. “Good. I already added him to the cousin list anyway.”

Drew, beside him, looked up from whatever he’d been examining in the garden bed. “Congratulations,” he said, simply, with the specific sincerity he brought to everything that mattered.

“Thank you, Drew,” I said.

I stood in the garden for a long while after that, Nick still close beside me, watching the late January light move across the bare branches of the oak tree above us – the same tree my father had assessed and approved months ago, the same garden where this entire impossible, exhausting, finally resolved year had quietly, steadily, become home.

I had spent seven months fighting for this exact moment.

Now that it had arrived, I understood that the fighting itself had changed me in ways the winning couldn’t undo and didn’t need to. I was not the same woman who had sat in a hotel room haemorrhaging, alone, with nobody coming.

I was not even the same woman who had walked into that first hearing in December. Steady but uncertain. Hoping the truth would be enough.

I was simply and finally someone who got to stop bracing.

Someone who got to just be Nick’s mother fully and permanently No custody schedule, No supervised window. No hearing date sitting somewhere on the horizon, waiting to be survived.