My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 156

A Sunday With Tiden

+25 BONUS

A Sunday With Aiden

~Julian-

I cancelled everything on Sunday morning.

Not for any reason I could fully articulate. I woke up at seven and looked at the calendar and thought about the calls and the strategy sessions and the legal briefs waiting on my desk, and I picked up my phone and cancelled all of it. Zane texted back a single question mark. I did not respond.

I drove to the park near the Windsor estate at nine AM and sat on a bench.

I had not done anything in years. I had forgotten what it felt like. I sat on the bench with my coffee and watched the park exist around me – dog walkers, joggers, a woman reading a book on the grass, and two elderly men playing chess at the stone table by the fountain.

I had been sitting there for forty minutes when I heard it.

“The simulator man!”

I turned and saw Aiden twenty feet away from me, already running.

He covered the distance in seconds and ston

directly in front of me, slightly out of breath, looking up at me with the clear, satisfied expression of someone who had just confirmed a theory.

“You’re here,” he said.

“I am,” I said.

“We are also here.” He gestured behind him where Gail was walking toward us with the resigned expression of someone who had just watched a five–year–old torpedo whatever plan she had for the morning. She caught my eye and gave a small shrug that said this was not orchestrated and also that she was not sorry about it.

Aiden sat down on the bench beside me without being invited. He put his bag on his lap and opened it and began pulling out items with the focus of someone unpacking for a long stay. A/remote–control car. A sandwich in a paper bag. A small notebook. A pencil case.

“What are you doing today?” he asked, not looking up from the bag.

“Apparently sitting with you,” I said.

He looked up. “Good,” he said. “I brought two cars.”

We fed the ducks first.

Aiden had strong opinions about duck feeding

the bread had to be torn into very small pieces and distributed evenly; no favouritism shown to the larger ducks who tried to push the smaller ones out. He enforced this with the focused authority of a child who had thought seriously about fairness.

“That one keeps stealing,” he said, pointing at a large mallard.

“He’s hungry,” I said.

“They’re all hungry,” Aiden said. “That’s the point.” He tore another piece and threw it deliberately to the small duck at the edge of the group. “You have to make sure everyone gets some.”

I looked at him.

“Where did you learn that?” I said.

“Mummy,” he said. Simply. He threw another piece. “She says the loudest person in the room is not always the hungriest one.”

A Sunday With Aiden

Iwas quiet for a moment.

“She’s right,” I said.

“She usually is,” he said.

+25 BONUS

The remote–control cars were serious business

Aiden had a course mapped in his head before we even got to the open path a circuit, essentially, with chicanes formed by sticks he placed in the gravel and a finish line he drew with his foot. He gave me the second controller with the focused instruction of someone handing over important equipment.

“This one pulls left,” he said. “You have to compensate.”

“Compensate how?”

“Hold the steering right by about ten per cent while you accelerate,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll spin out on the corners.”

I looked at him.

“Ten per cent“, I said.

“Approximately,” he said seriously.

We raced for forty minutes. He beat me on the first three circuits by significant margins. On the fourth, I compensated correctly and closed the gap. On the fifth I pushed too hard into the second chicane and spun out exactly the way he had warned me I would.

He did not say I told you so.

He simply stopped his car, walked over to mine, righted it, and handed the controller back.

“Again,” he said.

Gail bought ice cream from the truck at the edge of the park at two PM. Aiden chose chocolate. He ate it carefully, and he gave everything, making sure not to let it drip, occasionally looking up to watch the ducks on the pond or the chess players at the stone table or something in the middle distance that had caught his eye.

At some point he moved closer to me on the bench without appearing to decide to. Just a gradual migration, the way children moved toward warmth without acknowledging they were doing it.

He was talking about something – the engineering manual he had found at the Windsor house, a chapter on load–bearing structures that he had questions about – and his voice was doing the thing it did when he was genuinely interested in something, the pace quickening slightly, the hands starting to move.

I was listening.

Not performing listening. Actually listening to a five–year–old talk about load–bearing structures on a park bench on a Sunday afternoon and finding that I did not want to be anywhere else.

At three PM his voice slowed.

At three fifteen it stopped mid–sentence.

His head dropped.

It dropped sideways and landed on my arm

–

the full, boneless weight of a child who had been awake since six AM and had fed ducks and raced cars and eaten ice cream and talked about engineering and had simply run out of energy all at once.

He was asleep in seconds.

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