My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 129

A professional matchmaker

~Katia~

Dad called on a Tuesday afternoon while I was in the middle of annotating the London infrastructure brief.

I saw his name on the screen and picked up on the second ring, which was something I would not have done six months ago. Six months ago I would have let it go to voicemail and called back when I had decided what version of myself to present. Now I just picked up.

“Dad.”

“Katia.” He sounded slightly out of breath, which usually meant he had called from the garden and walked back inside faster than he intended. “Are you busy?”

“Always. What’s happened?”

He didn’t answer right away, which told me he was gathering himself to say something he was not entirely sure how to say.” Your mother has hired a matchmaker.”

I stopped annotating.

“I’m sorry?”

“A professional matchmaker. She has a website. A portfolio.” He paused again. “Testimonials.”

I put my pen down.

“Testimonials,” I repeated.

–

“Five stars, apparently. Very reputable.” Another pause. “I thought you should know before she before any of it reached you without warning.”

I started laughing.

I did not plan to laugh. It arrived before I could stop it the specific, slightly unhinged laugh of someone who had received information so absurd that the only appropriate response was laughter. A professional matchmaker. With testimonials.

“Dad,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“She hired an actual matchmaker.”

“With a portfolio,” he confirmed. “I’ve seen it. There are headshots.”

the stifled sound of a I laughed harder. I heard him on the other end doing the thing he did when he was trying not to join in man who found something funny and was doing his best to maintain appropriate paternal gravity and failing.

“I told her to stop,” he said. “Twice. She told me I didn’t understand the process.”

“The process,” I said.

“Apparently there is a process. Compatibility assessments. Initial consultations.” He paused. “I don’t fully understand it either.”

“Dad.”

“I know, I know.” He gave up on the gravity. A short laugh escaped. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

“It’s a little funny,” he agreed.

+25 BONUS

—

We sat with that for a moment the easy, slightly surprised quiet of two people who had discovered they could laugh at the same thing. It was new. Not uncomfortable, just new. Like finding a room in a house you had lived in for years that you had never opened before.

“I want you to know I’m not part of it,” he said. His voice had shifted – still warm but more direct now. “Whatever she sends your way, whatever she arranges, it isn’t from me. I think-” He stopped. “I think you have your own life, Katia. You’ve built something remarkable. You have Aiden. You have I*.” He paused and continued. “I think you know what you want and who you want it with, and your mother hiring a matchmaker isn’t going to change any of that.”

I was quiet for a moment.

He wasn’t wrong. He was, in the specific way that fathers could occasionally be, entirely right without knowing quite how right he was.

“She worries about you,” he said. “That’s where it comes from. It’s the wrong way to show it, but that’s where it comes from.”

“I know,” I said.

“And I worry about you too. Just differently.” Another pause. “I think you’re carrying a lot on your own. I think you have been for a long time. And I think “He stopped again. The careful fumbling of a man who wanted to say something true and was not sure he had earned the right to say it yet. “I just want you to know that you don’t have to anymore. Carry it alone, I mean. I’m here”

I looked at the London infrastructure brief on my desk. At the annotated pages and the coffee cup and the photograph of Aiden in the corner of the desk, three years old, laughing at something off–camera.

“I know, Dad,” I said.

“I’m on your side,” he said. “Whatever that looks like. Whatever you need.”

It was simple. There was nothing complicated about it and nothing performed. Just a man who had let his daughter down badly six years ago and had spent that time finding his way to the point where he could say a sentence like that and mean it

completely.

“I know,” I said again. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I’m six years late.”

“You’re here now,” I said.

“I am,” he said quietly.

We talked for another ten minutes about nothing in particular — Aiden’s go–kart league, a trip David was planning the London expansion that he had read about in a business article and wanted to understand properly. Small things. The specific small things that accumulated into something larger over time if you let them.

When he hung up, I sat at my desk for a moment.

I thought about what he had said. You know what you want and who you want it with.

I thought about Julian’s office yesterday. About his hands at my face and his forehead against mine and the certainty in his voice when he said, ‘I will fix this.‘

I thought about Delia.

About the fact that whatever Julian fixed or didn’t fix, whatever happened next, there was a version of the future that was going to require me to look my sister in the eye and tell her something I did not yet know how to say.

I did not have an answer for that yet.

I picked up my pen.

I went back to the London brief.

Some problems you solved. Some you sat with until the shape of them became clear enough to act on.

I was sitting with this one.

For now, that was enough.

+25 BONUS

+25 BONUS

The private Investigator

-Delia-

The investigator sent the report on a Thursday morning.

I read it at the kitchen table with coffee I didn’t touch.

He had found nothing on the financial history. Katia’s money trail before I* Technologies went public was a wall — clean, sealed, professionally maintained. He had hit it from four different angles and got nowhere. Whatever funded those early years was buried deep enough that he would need significantly more time and significantly more money to find it.

That was the bad news.

The good news was everything else

He had photographs. Forty–three of them, taken over three weeks by a contact he used for surveillance work. Katia and Julian at the Windsor family lunch. Katia and Julian at a child’s birthday party, standing close, her laughing at something he said. Katia leaving the WEG building on a Tuesday afternoon, Julian walking her to her car, the two of them talking in the street for eleven minutes before she got in.

Eleven minutes. He had timed it.

There was a photograph from the birthday party that I kept coming back to. Julian was crouched down talking to Aiden, and Katia was standing a few feet away watching them with an expression I had never seen on her face. I had spent twenty years watching my sister perform composure. That was not composure. That was something she was not managing at all.

I put that photograph to the side.

The investigator had also found Sam.

Not who Sam was

Sam’s personal history was apparently as clean as Katia’s financial records, which in itself was suspicious enough to be interesting. What he had found was the trail Sam left behind her. Multiple shell companies registered across four jurisdictions. Encrypted communication channels. Financial movements that ran through so many layers that even his contact with access to banking records couldn’t get to the bottom of them.

Ms Kensington operates behind a significant layer of protection managed almost entirely by her assistant, the report said. The assistant appears to manage both legitimate business operations and activities deliberately structured to avoid visibility. The nature of those activities is unclear, but the infrastructure surrounding them is professional and extensive.

I read that paragraph three times.

Activities structured to avoid visibility.

୮

Sam had always been everywhere Katia was. Every event, every meeting, every time something needed managing. I had always thought of her as a very competent assistant. I was starting to think she was something considerably more than that.

Then there were the I*******m posts.

My investigator had done something I hadn’t thought to do. He had cross–referenced the dates and locations of Julian’s posts against Katia’s public schedule.

France —- Julian posted from Antibes the same week Katia was there for a European tech forum.

Dubai shadows – Julian posted from the desert the same week Katia’s team was in Dubai for the I* expansion launch.

The Burj Khalifa dinner

Julian posted a picture of a dinner table for two from the highest restaurant in the world on a night

when Katia was staying three floors below him in the same hotel.

Every single post. Every one of them corresponded to a time and place where Katia was present.

I sat at the kitchen table for a long time

+25 BONUS

I was not a fool. I had never been a fool. I had simply been too close to something to see its full shape, and now that I was stepping back, I could see it clearly, and it was infuriating and humiliating, and it made the rejection from Julian’s hallway with the rose petals feel like a small wound compared to what was in front of me now.

He had been posting her.

All this time. The hands in France, the shadows in the desert, the dinner for two with the woman’s necklace visible in the corner of the frame. The whole world had been asking who she was, and the answer had been sitting in my family’s living room eating Sunday lunch and pretending not to look at my husband.

My husband, who had told me to my face that I was not his type.

My husband, who had apparently been documenting his time with my sister on social media for months.

I closed the report.

I opened my laptop.

I created a new document, and I titled it simply: What I Know.

I started writing.

Not everything

not yet. I wasn’t ready to use everything yet. But I wrote down what I had. The photographs. Sam’s shadow operations. The I*******m timeline. The eleven minutes in the street.

And at the bottom of the page, in a separate section, I wrote two names.

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