My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 298

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “Whatever it is, it will survive until tomorrow.”

I thought about Sam at her desk in Brooklyn, almost certainly assuming the worst about my silence, and felt a small twist of guilt that did not last long enough to actually move me toward the boat. There would be time for Sam tomorrow. There would be time for everything tomorrow, the dinner with my mother, the careful dance with Jude.

None of it reached this far out.

“What happens when we go back?” I asked, the question slipping out before I had fully decided to ask it.

Julian was quiet for a moment, his hand moving in a slow circle against my hip beneath the water.

“I do not know,” he said finally. “I have not let myself think past Saturday morning yet.”

“That is not like you,” I said. “You plan everything.”

“I plan everything I can control,” he said. “I am beginning to understand that whatever this is between us has never been one of those things.”

I lifted my head to look at him.

“Does that frighten you?” I asked.

“Yes,”

” he said, without hesitation, which surprised me more than the answer itself did. “It frightens me considerably.”

“Good,” I said. “It frightens me too.”

He smiled at that, a real smile, the kind I had only seen a handful of times since I had known him, and pulled me close enough that the water between us disappeared entirely.

We stayed there until the sky turned the deep orange that meant the sun had nearly finished its descent, and only then did we finally swim back toward the boat, slower than the crossing out had been, neither of us in any hurry to reach the shore.

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What You Are Not Telling Me

-Delia~

I saw the photograph before I understood what I was looking at.

It came up in my feed the way everything came up in my feed, scrolling past without asking permission, and then my thumb stopped moving entirely because the account posting it was Julian’s, and the image did not match the version of his account I had learned to expect. He was not someone who posted often. In the two years I had lived under his roof I could count the personal images on one hand.

A single photograph from a trip to France the year before, nothing more than a hand resting near two glasses of wine on a table, no faces, no names, nothing that told the world anything except that he had been somewhere and had a drink while he was there. I had stared at that photograph for longer than I wanted to admit, trying to determine whose hand was not in the frame, and had never found an answer.

That was the closest he had ever come to sharing anything about his life outside the boardroom.

This was not that.

A single image. Water so clear it looked unreal, the color of something that did not belong on the same planet as the grey Manhattan sky outside my window. A table set with candles on a strip of sand surrounded entirely by ocean. No caption. No location tag that meant anything to me.

I did not know where he was.

But I knew, with a certainty that settled into my stomach like a stone dropping through water, that he had not gone there alone.

Nobody photographed a candlelit dinner for one. Nobody set a table on a private sandbank in the middle of nowhere and took a single artistic photograph of it just to admire the work of the hotel staff. There was a person sitting across from him in that photograph, just out of frame, someone he had wanted to remember enough to capture, and that person was not me.

I had been asking myself for weeks who occupied his east wing/for those three days. I had driven to Brooklyn and walked into Katia’s board meeting and found her standing there, very much present, very much not the woman upstairs. I had told myself the mystery would resolve itself eventually, that I would find the answer through patience, through watching, through the slow accumulation of evidence.

The photograph answered nothing and confirmed everything at once.

I threw my phone at the wall.

The screen cracked along one corner, the device clattering to the floor of my sitting room, and I stood there breathing hard, my chest heaving, the rage that had been building in me for two years finally finding a direction to travel in. I picked up the small porcelain vase from the side table and threw that too, the sound of it shattering against the wall almost satisfying in a way I did not have the composure to examine.

“Out!” I screamed when one of the household staff appeared in the doorway, drawn by the noise. “Get out. All of you, get the fuck out of this wing right now.”

She fled.

I stood alone in the wreckage of my own sitting room for a long time, my breath slowly returning to something steadier, and then I picked up what remained of my phone and drove to the family estate

Grandma Celeste was in the morning room when I arrived, her reading glasses on, a book open in her lap that she set aside the moment she saw my face.

I did not manage composure. I had not managed it since the photograph, and I did not try to find it now, standing in front of the one person in this family who had never once treated me as an inconvenience

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I broke down before I had even finished crossing the rʊom.

“He has never touched me,” said, the words coming out in a rush between sobs that I could not control. “Not once. Not in two years. I moved into his house, Grandina Celeste, and I wear his ring in public, and he looks at me like we are housemates. He has been starving me of anything resembling a real marriage since the day I arrived, and now he brings women there. He brings them into our home and disappears for days, and I am supposed to sit there and pretend I do not notice.”

Grandma Celeste did not move to comfort me.

She watched me with the same calm, assessing patience she watched everything with, her hands folded in her lap, her expression giving away nothing of what she was thinking while I stood there falling apart in front of her.

“Sit down, Delia,” she said.

I sat.

I told her everything, or what felt like everything in the moment: the years of being walked past in corridors, the locked study, the meals eaten alone, and the photograph that had finally broken something in me that I had been holding together through sheer force of will. I told her about the trays going upstairs for three days. I told her about driving to Brooklyn and finding Katia exactly where she was supposed to be, which meant someone else entirely had been in that east wing.

Grandma Celeste listened to all of it without interrupting.

When I finished, the room was quiet for a long moment.

“I am the one who told Julian to marry you, Delia. I will not pretend otherwise. When it became clear Katia belonged to another man, I told my grandson that a Windsor needed a wife who understood what this family required, and I believed you could be that woman. I have watched this marriage from a distance because I believed it was a good match, one I had a hand in making, and I have never once imagined it was anything less than a real marriage between the two of you. So you will need to help me understand something, because what you are describing does not match what I thought I built.”

“He is humiliating me,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she said.

“There is no perhaps about it.”

Grandma Celeste looked at me for a long moment, and something in her expression shifted, sharpened slightly, the way it did when she was about to say something she had clearly been holding back for some time.

“If Julian is not touching you,” she said, “is there something else you are not telling me? Or are you selling me a story that paints you as a victim because you know that story is the one I am most likely to feel sorry for?”

! stared at her.

“I know my grandson,” she continued. “I have known him since he was a small boy who cried when his mother lett and never cried again after that, not once, not even at his own father’s funeral. He is not a cruel man, Delia. He is a careful one. There is a difference, even if it does not feel like one to you.”

“You think I am lying,” I said.

“I think,” Grandma Celeste said, “that you came into this house two years ago with a great deal of certainty about how this arrangement was going to end, and I think reality has not cooperated with that certainty, and I think it is far easier for you to call yourself a victim of his cruelty than to sit with the much harder truth that he simply does not want you the way you want him.” The words landed somewhere deep in my chest, sharper than anything Julian had ever said to me directly, because Julian’s coldness I had learned to absorb. This was different. This came from someone who was supposed to be on my side.

“That is not fair,” I said.

“Fairness has very little to do with it,” she said. “I am not asking you to feel better about what I have said I am asking you to

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