My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 167

I thought about Jules.

+25 BONUS

I thought about a night intas Vegas six years ago that I remembered in pieces and a man whose face I had never seen clearly and a marriage certificate with two names that had been sitting in my legal files since the year I had it quietly checked.

Jules.

I pressed my lips together.

I excused myself from the board meeting.

The bathroom on the executive floor was empty. I stood at the sink and ran the cold water and looked at the photograph one more time and then put my phone face down on the counter.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

I had been running a company for two years, raising a son for six, carrying a marriage certificate I could not explain and a ring I wore in a box by my bed because I did not know where else to put something that belonged to a person who had no name or face or location.

I had been telling myself for a year that I had never met Julian before the WEG partnership. But why the fuck does my sister’s husband have to look like my son?

I looked at my reflection.

–

It had been a wall. A necessary wall, built quickly, because the alternative – the thought that had been pressing at the edges of everything for months was too large to look at directly while also running a company and raising a child and managing Victor Hale and not falling apart.

The alternative was sitting on a park bench in a photograph on my phone with my son asleep on his arm.

I breathed.

Once.

Twice.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.

Then I said it out loud. Not to anyone. Just to myself. Just like the version of me standing at a sink on the executive floor of I* Technologies at two thirty in the afternoon who had been circling the same thought for twelve months and had finally run out of reasons not to look at it directly.

“Okay,” I said.

Just that. One word.

I turned off the tap.

I picked up my phone.

I went back to the board meeting.

I sat down and looked at Marcus and said, “Where were we?”

He told me. I nodded. I picked up my pen.

The meeting continued.

J

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