My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 163

The Ring in the Magazine

+25 BONUS

The Ring in the Magazine

~Gail-

I was having my second coffee when I opened the article.

Katia had texted me the link the night before with no message attached, just the link – which meant either it was very good of very complicated, and knowing Katia, it was probably both. I had saved it for the morning when I had enough caffeine to read properly.

I read it at the kitchen table of the Windsor estate while Aiden ate his breakfast across from me. He was reading something – one of Grandma’s encyclopaedias that he had adopted as his own and paying absolutely no attention to me, which meant I could read in peace.

The article was extraordinary.

She had taken Martha apart with such clean, quiet precision that I actually put my coffee down midway through and sat back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. A twenty–year–old thrown out while pregnant. Six years away. One year back. A family that didn’t know their grandson’s middle name.

Martha had given a magazine interview implying her daughter’s marriage was suspicious, and Katia had responded by putting the entire Kensington situation on the front page of a national publication.

I read it twice.

Then I scrolled to the photographs.

There was one of Katia at her desk. One of her beside her car. One of her and Aiden’s side by side

his shoulder, both of them looking directly at the camera with the same calm, direct attention.

his navy shirt, her hand on

I was looking at Aiden’s face in the photograph–the way he held himself, the chin slightly raised–when I saw it.

On Katia’s left hand, and I screamed.

Not loudly, just a short, sharp sound that escaped before I could stop it – the involuntary noise of someone whose brain had just short–circuited completely.

Aiden looked up from his encyclopaedia. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I said. My voice was not entirely steady. “I’m fine. Eat your breakfast.”

He looked at me for a moment with the clear, assessing eyes that missed nothing. Then he went back to his book.

I looked at the photograph again.

The ring on Katia’s hand was the Windsor firestone.

I knew that ring. I had grown up in a house with portraits of women wearing that ring. I had seen it in the family documentation, in the photographs in Grandma’s sitting room, in the velvet box on Julian’s desk that he had been carrying around for seven years like a talisman. I knew that ring the way I knew my own name.

It was on Katia’s hand.

In a national magazine photograph.

My hands were shaking slightly as I picked up the magazine

we had a physical copy delivered; Grandma still preferred print

and found the page and walked down the hallway to the sitting room where Grandma was already up and reading correspondence at her desk.

“Grandma,” I said.

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The Ring in the Magazine

+25 BONUS

She looked up.

I held the magazine out. did not say anything. I pointed at the photograph.

Grandma took the magazine from my hands. She looked at it. She found the photograph. She looked at Katia’s hand.

She went very still.

The sitting room was completely quiet. Aiden was still in the kitchen with his encyclopaedia. The house was doing its morning thing around us – the distant sounds of the kitchen, the light coming through the east windows, the particular quality of the Windsor estate in the morning that I had known my whole life.

Grandma looked at the ring for a long time.

Then one tear slipped.

Just one. She did not make anything of it. She did not wipe it immediately or acknowledge it. It simply arrived and tracked down her face, and she looked at the ring in the photograph and breathed slowly.

I sat down across from her and waited.

Finally, she set the magazine down on her desk. She looked at it for another moment. Then she looked at me.

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“She has had it all this time,” she said quietly. “Six years.”

“Yes,” I said.

“She has been carrying it for six years,” Grandma paused. “And Julian has been searching for six years.” She looked at the photograph one more time. “And neither of them knew.”

I did not say anything.

Grandma folded her hands in her lap. She had the expression she wore when she was thinking through something large and complicated and had decided not to say most of what she was thinking.

“I don’t know,” she said finally, “how Julian is going to pull this off.”

“Pull what off?” I said.

“All of it.” She gestured – a small, encompassing gesture that covered everything. The marriage with Delia. Victor Hale. The article. The ring now visible to anyone who looked at the right photograph. “All of it, Gail. It is a great deal to untangle.”

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