Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 291

Chapter 278: Going Home

SEDONA

The lease on the Lincoln Park house ended in March, and somewhere around February, I had to actually sit down and answer a question I’d been avoiding for longer than I wanted to admit.

Where was home now?

Chicago had given me back my son. I would never stop being grateful for that. But Chicago had also given me the hospital corridor, the hotel room, six years of slowly disappearing inside a marriage I hadn’t recognized was destroying me until it nearly had. Chicago held both things at once, the way most important places eventually did, and I understood, sitting with the lease paperwork spread across the kitchen table, that I didn’t want to build the rest of Nick’s childhood on top of all that layered history.

Seattle had given me everything else. My parents. Cameron. Dr. Mitchell, and the slow, careful work of learning to live in my body again. The tennis facility where I’d found my way back to a version of myself I’d thought was permanently gone.

A garden with a Japanese maple, which my father had planted the year I was born.

I called Cameron before I’d fully decided. I needed to discuss with a trusted person who would tell me the truth. Not just agree with whatever I said first.

“I think we’re moving to Seattle,” I said. “Properly. Not visiting. Living there.”

“I think that’s right. What’s making you sure?”

The way he answered without hesitation confirmed to me he’d been expecting this call for a while.

“Chicago has too much of the old version of me in it,” I said. “Every street corner has some memory attached to it I’d rather not keep stepping over. Seattle has the version of me I actually like. The one that came back from all of it.” I looked out the kitchen window at the bare March garden. “And Nick deserves to grow up somewhere that isn’t constantly reminding me of things I’m trying not to carry into how I raise him.”

“What about Dante?” Cameron asked. “And Drew. Have you talked to him about it?”

“Not formally,” I admitted. “But his facility’s based in Seattle anyway, Chicago was always temporary for him too, just longer than expected because of the trial and the recovery.” I paused. “I think it might actually work out simply if I let myself stop overthinking it.”

I talked to Dante that evening in the back garden. The same place he’d asked me to put a name on what we were, months earlier.

“I think we’re moving to Seattle permanently. Nick needed a fresh start somewhere that wasn’t tangled up in everything that happened here.”

“I thought that’s the right call. Dante said, without a beat of hesitation.

“You didn’t sound surprised.”

I’m not.

My facility’s there. Drew’s settled into school there easier than he ever settled here. Chicago winters were never kind to him, and the bird-watching’s better in Seattle anyway, according to him, which apparently matters more than Trealized. He took my hand. “I was going to ask you about this myself, eventually. You just got there first.”

“So we’re doing this,” I said. “All of us.”

“All of us,” he confirmed.

Nick took the news carefully, the way he took most big things, turning it over slowly before committing to a reaction.

“New school?” he said.

“Four minutes,” he announced, the first week they’d settled in. “If run the shortcut through the Hendersons’ yard. Five if I take the sidewalk like a civilized person.”

“You’re not running through the Hendersons’ yard,” Lucian said.

“I’m just saying it’s an option,” Lake said.

By midsummer, the whole sprawling assembly of us had settled into a radius small enough that Sunday dinners stopped requiring planning entirely; my mother simply made enough food for everyone, every week, the assumption built so deeply into the rhythm now that nobody bothered confirming attendance anymore. Drew and Nick’s bird notebooks had merged into a shared running tally, the friendly competition Drew had proposed months ago now a fixture of their summer, the two of them disappearing into my father’s garden for hours at a stretch.

I stood in my parents’ kitchen one evening in late June, watching the whole noisy, overlapping mess of it, Nick and Drew arguing good-naturedly about a sparrow’s exact species, Lake narrating something to Cameron with his usual volume, my mother orchestrating dinner with the specific contentment of a woman whose table had finally, fully filled itself.

Dante found me there, leaning against the counter.

“Feels different than Lincoln Park,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”

“Lincoln Park was where I got him back,” I said. “This is where we get to just live.”

He took my hand, and I leaned into him, and watched my son laugh at something across the kitchen, easy, unguarded, completely, permanently home.

It had taken so long to get here.

I intended to simply, finally, enjoy it.