Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 301

Chapter 292: Staying On

LUCIAN

The question came up the way most practical questions between Cameron and me came up, not as a dramatic conversation we’d scheduled in advance, but sideways, in the middle of something else entirely.

We were going through his diary for the following month, the same way we’d gone through his diary for every month across the past several years, and Cameron looked up from the schedule on his screen and said, in the tone he used when something had been sitting in the back of his mind for a while and had finally decided to come forward:

“We should probably talk about the job.”

“Which job?” I said, though I already knew exactly which job.

“Yours,” he said. “Mine. The fact that in approximately four months you’re going to be married to your employer, and whether that changes anything about the working arrangement.”

I considered this for approximately ten seconds.

“It doesn’t,” I said. “Turn the page, there’s a conflict on the fourteenth I need to walk you through.”

Cameron looked at me.

“Lucian.”

“I’m aware of what the situation is. I’ve thought about it already. I like the job, I’m good at the job, and I have no intention of leaving it because we’re getting married. Can we look at the fourteenth?”

He didn’t let it go that easily, because Cameron never let things go that easily when he’d decided they warranted proper attention, which I’d known about him since approximately the second month of working for him.

“The board might find it unusual,” he said.

“The board finds many things unusual. That’s generally not a good reason to make major life decisions,” I said

Cameron smiled and turned towards me. A slight smile on his lips, and he remarked. “I hope you’re not staying because you feel obligated. or because changing anything feels complicated. I want you to actually want to be here.”

I set down the schedule entirely and looked at him properly, the same way I’d learned to look at him when something needed to be said without any of the professional layer between us.

“Cameron,” I said. “I took this job because I was good at it and I needed stable work for Lake and me. I stayed in this job, through some fairly significant complications I won’t list right now, because it genuinely suits me, the work, the pace, the fact that I’m actually useful to you in a way that matters. None of that has changed because we’re getting married. In fact…” I paused. “In fact, it’s probably the arrangement that gives us the most overlapping time in the same space, which, given that we also have a wedding to plan and Lake’s ongoing binder projects to manage, seems like a practical advantage rather than a problem.”

Cameron sat calmly and quietly for a couple of seconds. He looked at me and said. “You’ve thought about this a lot.”

“Ten seconds, I told you now the fourteenth.”

He raised it once more, a week later. Trespected that. Cameron processed things in multiple passes; it was part of why he was good at his job, and also occasionally exhausting.

“What if people say I’ve put you in an impossible position? That you can’t actually advocate for yourself at work because you’re married to the person who makes the decisions?”

“I’ve been advocating for myself at work for years,” I said. “Including when you were genuinely my boss, and there was an actual power imbalance to manage carefully. I didn’t struggle then. And I’m not going to struggle now.”

Everywhere was quiet for a couple of minutes. I turned and looked at him with half a blurred eye. Then, I said to him. “Are you worried about what people would say, or whether it’s actually right for me?”

“The second one,” he admitted. “Mostly.”

That seems about right,” I said.

“You’re not surprised.”

“Priya’s extremely observant,” I said. “I noticed that about her when we hired her. I assumed it was only a matter of time.”

Cameron sat down across from me. “Tspent a significant amount of energy maintaining appropriate professional distance.”

“You did,” I agreed. “And I spent a significant amount of energy appreciating that you were doing it, and occasionally finding it quite frustrating, but mostly appreciating it.” I smiled at him. “The board is fine, Cameron. The job is fine. We are fine. Can we please get through the rest of the diary, because you have a three o’clock that requires actual preparation.”

He laughed, the real version, the brief quiet one.

“Yes,” he said. “The three o’clock.”

We worked through the rest of the afternoon the way we always worked, It was the same as it had always been. The same and completely different, in the way that everything between us was the same and completely different now, the job, the flat, the Tuesday evenings that had started as a careful arrangement for Lake’s sake and had become, slowly and without announcement, simply where we lived.

I was staying.

Not from obligation. Not from habit, too comfortable to break.

Because this was mine, and I was good at it, and I had decided, somewhere across all those careful Tuesdays, across the years of showing up and being steady and building something real enough to last, that I was allowed to keep the things that worked, even when the reasons for them had shifted entirely.

Even when the job had become something I shared a home with, and a son with, and a wedding date with, and a future I hadn’t let myself imagine clearly until it had simply, one ordinary Tuesday, arrived.