All Chapters of Loving the Billionaire I hate: Chapter 21 - Chapter 24

We took the coast drive on Wednesday. Dominic cleared his morning, which based on what I knew of his schedule meant he had moved three things and told no one where he was going. He came out of the bedroom at eight in jeans and a dark sweater and I had never seen him in jeans before and I made a deliberate decision not to comment on it because I would not have been able to do so neutrally. He drove. I hadn't expected that either. I had assumed there would be Patrick and the car, but it was just Dominic and a slate grey vehicle I hadn't seen before and the highway heading north. I put the window down. He didn't comment. We didn't talk for the first twenty minutes and it was the best twenty minutes I'd had in recent memory. Cities falling away, water appearing between hills, the particular relief of movement without destination. "My mother used to sing on drives," I said eventually. "Old Filipino love songs that she only half-remembered. She'd fill in the parts she forgot with h

The interview was scheduled for Friday.Thursday night I couldn't sleep. Not from dread exactly, more from the specific alertness that came before something that mattered. I lay in the dark thinking about what I would say, how I would talk about my mother without making it grief-performance, how to tell a true story without telling the whole story.At some point I gave up and went to the kitchen.Dominic was already there.He was at the island with a glass of water and his phone face down, not working, just sitting in the way I had learned meant he was thinking through something he hadn't resolved yet. He looked up when I came in."Couldn't sleep," I said."No."I got water and sat across from him and we existed in the kitchen at two in the morning the way we exist everywhere now, without effort, without performance."Are you nervous about tomorrow," he said."About talking about her. Yes." I turned the glass in my hands. "Everything else I can manage. But she's — I don't have a contr