Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 298

Chapter 286: The Proposal.

DANTE

I told Drew first, which was either the smartest or the most foolish decision I’d ever made, and by the second day I genuinely couldn’t tell which.

I want your opinion on something,” I said, finding him in his room with his bird notebook open. The late afternoon light was coming through his window.

“I’m going to ask Sedona to marry me.” Drew’s hand trembled slightly and his pencil fail on the table. The specific deliberate stillness he brought to information that mattered.

“Okay,” he said. “When.”

“Soon. I haven’t decided exactly when yet. I wanted to talk to you about it first, since this changes things for you too, not in a bad way, I hope, but it’s a real change, and I wanted you to have a say before I did anything.”

He considered this seriously. “Do I get a say in the ring?”

“You can have an opinion on the ring,” I said. “I’ve already chosen it. But I’m willing to hear feedback.”

“Okay,” he said again, satisfied. Then, after a pause: “Can I tell Nick?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet. But when ever it will be I want to do this quietly. I prefer to do it just between two of us, and tell everyone afterward. Can you keep this between us?

“Yes,” Drew said, with total confidence.

He lasted one day.

I found out the next afternoon, when Nick approached me in the kitchen with the careful, barely-contained expression of someone who had been told something enormous and was attempting, badly, to act normal about it.

“Hey, Dante,” he said. “No reason. Just wondering. Hypothetically. What type of location would be your ideal place for one to propose marriage to another.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“Drew told you,” I said.

“He didn’t tell me tell me,” Nick said, with the specific moral precision of a six-year-old constructing a technical defence. “He just asked me hypothetical questions about rings for like twenty minutes and then got really quiet when I asked why he was asking.”

I found Drew in the garden ten minutes later, still working on his bird sketches with the specific innocence of someone who believed he’d executed a flawless operation.

“You told Nick,” I said.

"i did not tell him,” Drew said, echoing Nick’s exact defense with a straight face that nearly undid my resolve to be even mildly stern about it. “I conducted a hypothetical inquiry. He drew his own conclusions.”

“Drew.”

“It’s a very good ring,” Drew said, by way of apology. “I got excited.”

I decided, given the security of the secret had already collapsed within forty-eight hours, that I needed to move sooner rather than later, before the entire household had somehow pieced it together through Drew’s increasingly transparent “hypothetical inquiries.”

I wanted it small. I’d thought about this carefully, turning it over across weeks of planning, both Sedona and I had spent the better part of a year having our lives narrated by other people, dissected in articles, photographed without consent, turned into content neither of us had asked to become. I didn’t want this moment to be anything except entirely ours. No grand gesture, no audience, no carefully staged photograph for anyone else’s benefit.

I asked her to come with me to the facility on a Sunday evening, after everyone else had gone home, the courts empty and quiet in the particular gold light of early evening.

“Why here,” she asked, as we walked onto the same court where I’d first watched her hit a forehand. That one forehand that told me, immediately, who she actually was underneath everything she’d been carrying.

“Because this is where I first understood you weren’t broken,” I said.

“Whatever you thought about yourself at the time. I watched you on this court and I saw someone fighting her way back to herself, and I wanted to ask you this exact question in the same place I first started loving you, even before I let myself admit that’s what was happening.”

She went very still.

I reached into my pocket and got down on one knee, the specific simplicity of it feeling exactly right, no audience, no staged photograph, just the empty court and the gold evening light and the two of us, finally, after everything, arriving at this.

“Sedona,” I said. “I’ve spent this whole year watching you rebuild yourself. Piece by piece, with more courage than I’ve ever seen from anyone. I want to spend the rest of my life beside you while you keep doing that. And while I do the same thing alongside you.”

“I want Nick and Drew to grow up knowing they’re brothers in every way that actually matters, not just by circumstance. I want to marry you. Quietly, on our own terms, the way we’ve finally earned the right to do everything else in our lives.”

She was crying before I finished, the good kind, her hands pressed briefly over her mouth the way Jennifer’s had been at the match months ago.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, completely, yes.”

I slid the ring onto her finger, simple and unfussy, exactly what we’d both agreed without ever explicitly discussing it that we wanted – nothing for anyone else to photograph or comment on, just something true between the two of us.

She kissed me, slow and certain, on the same court where this entire impossible, hard-won year had quictly begun to turn itself around.

“Drew already told Nick,” I admitted, when we finally separated. “Via hypothetical inquiry.”

She laughed, startled, into my shoulder. “Of course he did.”

“I’m fairly confident the entire household already knows by now,” I said. “Drew’s cover story collapsed within a day.”

“That tracks,” she said, still laughing. “He’s brilliant at almost everything except keeping secrets.”

We came home to find the kitchen lights already on, far too many people gathered for a Sunday evening that hadn’t technically been scheduled for anything.

Jennifer was the first to see Sedona’s hand, and the sound she made was somewhere between a gasp and outright triumph.

“Finally,” she said, which made it clear that Drew’s “hypothetical inquiry” had, in fact, traveled the entire length of the household within forty-eight hours.

Lake, predictably, was already holding his notebook. “I need the date,” he announced. “For planning purposes.”

“We haven’t decided a date yet, Lake,” I said.

“That’s fine,” Lake said, unbothered. “I’ll start a tentative outline.”

Drew looked at me with the specific guilty satisfaction of someone who knew he’d broken his promise but had clearly decided the outcome justified it.

“Sorry,” he said. “I got excited.”

“I know,” I said, and pulled him into a hug, because there was nothing in the world to actually be upset about – just a house full of people who loved us enough to already be celebrating before we’d even finished telling them.

Sedona caught my eye across the noisy kitchen, her ring catching the light, her whole face open in the specific way it had been slowly, steadily, becoming open across this entire year.

We were getting married.

Quietly. On our own terms.

Exactly the way we’d both finally, completely earned the right to.

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The Ritchen settled, eventually, into the comfortable, overlapping warmth that had become its permanent texture…. my mother already drafting a guest list despite my repeated insistence that nothing was decided yet, Lake nasting his “tentative outline” to anyone who’d listen, Drew quietly basking in everyone’s gentle teasing about his catastrophic secret-keeping, Nick already deep in negotiation with Drew about what their respective wedding jobs should be.

Dante found me by the window, watching all of it.

“Regrets about the small, quiet proposal,” he said, “given the chaos it produced anyway?”

“None,” I said. “The proposal was exactly what we needed it to be. This…” I gestured at the loud, joyful kitchen around us, “…this is what we built it for. I wanted the asking to be ours. I’m glad the celebrating belongs to everyone.”

He took my hand, the ring catching the kitchen light again, and I felt the particular settled completeness of an ending that wasn’t really an ending at all.

Just a new shape for everything that had already, slowly, patiently, been built.

A family, finally whole. A son who had found his way to gladness. A house full of noise and love and a notebook full of Lake’s increasingly elaborate planning that nobody had the heart to discourage.

I leaned into Dante’s shoulder and let myself, completely, simply have it.