My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 220

Just Here

~Julian-

+25 BONUS

She had not gone to the penthouse,

The team sent me the location fifteen minutes after I left the Kensington house, and I sat in the car outside the Kensington’s gate and looked at the address on my phone and understood immediately. She had not gone home. She had driven somewhere else–not far, not toward Manhattan, just somewhere that was not her mother’s house and was not mine and was hers in a

different way.

The waterfront.

I had been there once, briefly, in a different context. A stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront with a car park that looked over the water toward Manhattan. The kind of place people went when they needed the city in their eyeline but at a distance they could

manage.

I drove there.

Her car was the only one in the car park.

She was not in it.

E

I found her on the walkway along the water. Standing at the railing, her coat pulled around her, looking at Manhattan across the river. The city was doing what it did at night the lights, the movement, the particular brightness of it that never fully went

dark.

I parked.

I walked to the railing.

I stood beside her.

She did not look at me. She had heard me coming the footsteps on the walkway and the way I walked that she had been cataloging without meaning to for over a year–and she had chosen not to look. So I looked at the city instead.

We stood there.

The water moved. The lights moved. A boat somewhere on the river made a sound that carried across the distance and then was

gone.

I did not ask if she was alright.

She was not alright. She had stood up at her mother’s dinner table and said seven years‘ worth of things that needed saying and had taken her son’s hand and walked out, and somewhere between the front door and this railing something had caught up with her. I did not need to ask. I could see it in the set of her shoulders and the way she was holding the railing and the fact that she had driven to water instead of home.

I put my hand over hers on the railing.

She did not move.

I did not move.

We stayed like that until she was ready to go.

She drove herself back to the penthouse.

I followed.

The doorman nodded at me. I went up.

Just Here

+25 BONUS

She was already inside. Her coat was on the hook. Her bag was on the floor near the kitchen table in the way it landed when she had not had the energy to put it where it belonged. The lights were low- the kind of low that happened when someone had turned on the first switch they reached and had not thought about it further.

She had gone to the bedroom.

I stood in the kitchen for a moment.

I filled a glass of water and set it on the bedside table on her side. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes and my jacket and my tie. I hung the jacket over the chair. I rolled up my sleeves.

She was in the bed. Under the duvet, on her side, facing the window. Her eyes were open- I could see the reflection of the city light on them. She was not asleep. She was doing the thing where she was very still and very present and not ready to talk, and the silence was the only honest thing available to her.

I did not ask if she was alright.

I got in.

I moved toward her. She did not move away. I put my arm around her waist and pulled her back against my chest, and she let me -let the weight of me settle against her back, let my arm be where it was, and let the warmth of it replace whatever cold thing she had been holding since the dinner table.

I pressed my lips to the back of her neck.

Not a kiss exactly. Just there. Present. The way you put your hand on something to tell it you were not going anywhere.

She breathed.

One breath. Then another.

The city moved outside the window. The lights shifted the way they shifted all night, the slow, continuous movement of a city that did not stop for anything, including this.

I lay with her.

I did not say anything about the dinner. I did not say anything about Martha or Delia or the things she had said at the table or the seven years they sat on. I did not say anything about Christopher or the seating plan or what I had seen on Aiden’s face when Gail brought him back into the room.

I did not say anything.

I was just there.

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