Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 292

Chapter 279. Gerald the Boot, For Real

NICK

We did general cleaning on a Saturday. Mum said Saturdays were for things that didn’t need to be rushed.

She’d bought the stars weeks before. I found out by accident. I saw the box in her closet when I was looking for socks. I pretended not to see it. I wanted her to have the surprise, even though I already knew. That felt important. Letting her have it, even though I’d already found it.

She came into my room after lunch. Box in one hand, stepladder in the other. She looked like she actually wanted to do this. Not just because it was nice for me. Because it meant something to her, too.

“Ready?”

“Yeah, ready.”

I’d already moved Gerald the Boot over. We’d brought him from Chicago carefully, in a small bag I’d packed myself, refusing to let anyone else hold it on the plane. He was already up on the new ceiling, in the corner near the window, the same lopsided shape with the extra star for the heel that Drew had insisted on, looking a little smaller now against all the empty space around him.

“He looks lonely up there by himself,” I said.

“Not for long,” Mum said.

She climbed the ladder, and I handed her stars one at a time, and we didn’t really talk much at first, just the quiet kind of working together, her pressing each star where I pointed, me checking from the bed to see how it looked from down low, which was the only way that actually mattered.

“Not there,” I said when she put one too close to the window. “Move it left.

“The rain will wash it out.”

“You’ve thought about this.

“I think about it a lot,” I admitted.

We worked for almost an hour. No two-hour timer this time. No, Mrs. Peterson is checking her watch. No supervisor was making notes about how the visit was going. Just us. A box of stars. A Saturday afternoon with absolutely nowhere else either of us needed to be.

When we finished, I turned off the lights. We lay down on my bed together and looked up.

The stars glowed faintly at first. The way they always did right after the lights went off. Slowly getting brighter as our eyes adjusted.

Gerald hid the Boot in the corner. A scattered handful near the window that didn’t mean anything yet. And in the middle, the new ones, the ones we’d just put up together, waiting for a shape.

“Okay,” Mum said. “Let’s make it.”

I’d been thinking about this for months,

“That one,” I said, pointing. “And that one. And down there.”

Mum traced where + pointed with her finger against the dark, connecting them the way you’d connect dots, except slower, because we weren’t in any hurry.

“Okay,” I said. “As long as it’s the good kind.”

We lay there a while longer, looking up at The Whole Time, Gerald the Boot keeping watch in the corner, the rest of the ceiling still mostly empty and waiting for whatever we decided to add to it next, more constellations, more nights like this one, an entire sky still left to fill in over however many years we got to do it now.

“Mum,” I said.

“Yeah, bug.”

“This is the best room I’ve ever had.”

“I know,” she said. “I made sure of it.”

Downstairs, I could hear the regular sounds of the house: Grandma Jennifer doing something in the Kitchen, Grandpa Parker’s low voice, the faint sound of the TV. Outside my window, Lake and Drew’s bikes were probably still leaning against the fence from earlier, left there until tomorrow because nobody needed to rush home anymore. Everybody who mattered was just a few streets away, or right downstairs, or lying right next to me, looking up at the same five stars.

I closed my eyes for a second, just to feel it, the specific, solid feeling of nothing being temporary anymore. No countdown. No timer. No two hours that would end too soon.

Just this. The whole time.

I opened my eyes one more time and looked up at the new constellation. Mum was still beside me. The stars glowed steady and quiet above us both.

Then I let myself fall asleep.