My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 147

The Ring

Grandma Celeste

I have lived long enough to know when the universe is trying to tell me something.

It does not shout. It does not announce itself. I simply places something in front of you, a face, a word, or a small hand pointing at a portrait and waits to see if you are paying attention.

I was paying attention.

The boy was still looking at the painting. His finger raised, pointing at the ring on my younger self’s hand. The Windsor firestone. Four generations of Windsor women had worn that ring. My mother had placed it on my finger the morning of my wedding and told me to guard it well because it could not be replaced. It had been custom–made for us, one of a kind, by a jeweller in Edinburgh who had been commissioned by Julian’s great–great–grandfather and had taken three years to complete it. There was no other ring in the world that looked like it.

Julian had come home six years ago without it.

He had sat in this very room and told me it was lost. He could not explain where or how. He had not been able to look at me directly when he said it, and I had let it go because there was something in his face that told me the story was more complicated than a missing ring, and pushing him would not help. I had filed it away the way I filed everything and waited.

I had been waiting for six years.

And now there was a boy in my sitting room pointing at a portrait and telling me his mother had the ring his father gave her on their wedding day.

I sat down beside him.

“Aiden,” I said.

He turned. He looked at me with his grandmother’s eyes – Julian’s eyes, my eyes, the Windsor eyes that had been looking out of the same face since before this house was built. He did not look away. He did not fidget. He simply looked at me and waited, the way intelligent children waited when they understood that something real was being said to them.

“Tell me about your mother’s ring,” I said.

He looked back at the portrait first, making sure he had it right.

“It’s silver,” he said. “But old. Mummy says there are two kinds of silver been somewhere. Hers is the kind that has been somewhere.”

the kind that wants to show off and the kind that has

ľ

My chest was very tight.

“The stone,” I said.

“Orange,” he said. “But not plain orange. More like when you look at fire and you can see all the colours inside it at the same time.” He tilted his head at the portrait. “Like that one.”

I had worn that ring for forty years. I had looked at it in every kind of light. And this child had just described it more precisely than most adults could have managed.

“Does she wear it often?” I said.

“Sometimes,” he said. “She’s careful about it. She doesn’t wear it everywhere.” He thought about this. “She keeps it in a box by her bed. I’ve seen her look at it sometimes when she thinks I’m asleep. She just holds it.”

I thought about the ring sitting in a box by a woman’s bed for six years. A woman who did not know where it had come from or who had put it on her finger or what it meant. Holding it in the dark because it was the only thing she had left from a night she could not fully remember.

The Ring

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“Do you know where it came from?” I said.

“My father gave it to her, he said Simply. Completely. “On their wedding day.”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked her once,” he said. “I asked where the ring came from. She said my father gave it to her.” He paused. “She looked sad when she said it, so I didn’t ask again.”

I looked at this boy.

I looked at the jaw that was Julian’s jaw. The hands that were Julian’s hands. The way he had tilted his head left three times since walking into this room was Julian’s habit, so ingrained that I had stopped noticing it in my grandson years ago and was only seeing it now because it was sitting in a smaller face looking up at me.

Julian had given Katia Kensington the Windsor firestone ring.

the

Which meant Julian and Katia had met before the WEG partnership. Which meant the night in Las Vegas six years ago night Julian had come home from changed and quiet and unable to explain why – Katia had been there. And something had happened between them that neither of them fully remembered, and neither of them had connected to the other.

And this child was the result.

I thought about the engagement I had arranged when Katia was fourteen and I had held her small hands and looked into her clear eyes and known – the way I knew things that she was meant for my family. I had waited. I had been patient. I had arranged the formal proposal when she was eighteen and been told to keep it from her until she was ready.

I had kept my patience through Katia’s disappearance and the pregnancy the Kensingtons had been so ashamed of and the six years of silence and the reappearance with a company and a son and a composure that told me she had survived something difficult and come out the other side stronger.

I had been patient through all of it.

And now the patience was over.

“Your father,” I said carefully. “Has anyone ever told you what he looks like?”

Aiden shook his head. “Mummy doesn’t talk about him much.” He paused. “But she looks at me sometimes like she’s seeing someone else. I don’t mind. I think she misses him.”

“I think she does too,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment. Then, with the directness of a child who had decided a conversation had been interesting enough to engage with properly: “Do you know who he is?”

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