My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 312

Martha’s eyes had not left her daughter, something raw breaking through the careful composure she had worn since the moment I asked my first question, the same instinct that had kept her performing for an entire room now failing her completely.

“Sweetheart,” she said, softer now, almost pleading, “just say it. Just tell me it isn’t true, whatever your sister is implying, and we can all sit back down and finish this dinner together. Please.”

“Mother,” Delia said, and something in the way she said it, thin and stretched and a half breath away from breaking entirely, told everyone in that room exactly how close she was to either confessing something or shattering completely under the weight of trying not to.

David crossed the room and put a hand gently on his wife’s arm, the first physical thing he had done all evening beyond stand near the window with a drink, his voice low when he spoke.

“Martha. Let her breathe a moment.”

“I don’t want her to breathe,” Martha said, not unkindly, though the words came out raw anyway. “I want her to answer me.”

The silence stretched again, longer this time, heavier, my mother’s question and mine both hanging unanswered in a room that had gone almost entirely still around us.

“Delia,” Martha said a third time, all of her earlier brightness gone now, replaced by something closer to genuine alarm. “Answer me.”

The silence held.

I felt the weight of it settle over the entire room, heavier with every second that passed, every person at this dinner now watching her and waiting, Jude shifting his weight near the bar cart as though he wanted to step in and had finally understood there was nothing left to say that would help him, and still, my sister stood frozen in the middle of my living room and said absolutely nothing at all.

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Would That Be Cheating

Katia

Nobody moved.

I let the silence sit for a long moment, watching my sister stand frozen in the middle of my living room. watching the question she refused to answer settle over the entire room like something with actual weight, and then I turned away from her and looked at everyone else instead.

“Fine,” I said. “She won’t answer. Let’s ask the table instead.”

“Katia,” David said quietly, a warning, though it came out more tired than firm.

“I have a simple question,” I said, ignoring him entirely. “Since my sister apparently cannot confirm, with any confidence, whether the man standing in this room is actually her husband, I would like everyone here to answer something for me. If I am sleeping with Julian Windsor, is that cheating?”

The question landed flat and exact in the middle of the room, and nobody answered it.

Martha’s hand had found her pearls again, the same gesture she made whenever a conversation grew sharper than she had prepared for, except tonight there was no recovering from it, no graceful pivot toward dessert or flowers or anything else she might have used to smooth the evening back into something manageable.

“Well,” she said finally, her voice thin, “that depends entirely on whether he is, in fact, her husband. Which is the question we have all been asking for the last several minutes and have yet to receive an answer to.

“1

“Exactly my point,” I said.

Jude shifted near the bar cart, his expression caught somewhere between alarm and the particular kind of calculation I had started to recognize on him over the past several weeks, the look of a man rapidly trying to determine which version of events would leave him standing in the best position once this conversation ended.

“This is absurd,” he said. “Katia, you’re speaking in riddles to embarrass your own family. If you have something to say, say it plainly.”

“I think I have been saying it plainly,” I said. “Everyone in this room simply prefers not to hear it.

“I would like to hear it,” David said, surprising me, his voice steadier now than it had been all evening. Plainly. Whatever it is you’re circling, Katia. Just say it.”

I looked at him for a moment, my father, a man who had spent most of my life occupying the edges of every difficult conversation this family ever had, finally asking to be let into the center of one, and something in me almost softened toward him before I remembered exactly how many years he had spent doing nothing while his wife did all the asking and all the deciding for both of them.

“Not yet,” I said. “First I want an answer to my question. Would it be cheating?”

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“This is ridiculous,” Delia said, finding her voice at last, though it came out thinner than she probably intended. “You’re asking a hypothetical that doesn’t even make sense. Of course it would be cheating Julian is my husband. You know that.”

“Do I,” I said. “Because a moment ago, when our mother asked you to simply confirm it out loud, you couldn’t manage the sentence.”

“I was upset,” Delia said. “You’d ambushed me in front of my entire family.”

“I asked you one question,” I said. “You had every opportunity to answer it the moment it was asked Instead, you stood there for nearly a full minute saying absolutely nothing, and now that I’ve widened the question, suddenly you’ve found your voice again.”

“Because you’re humiliating me,” Delia said, her voice cracking. “You’ve turned a family dinner into a courtroom, and I’m the only one apparently on trial.”

“You put yourself on trial the moment you decided the right response to my pain was to accuse me of wanting what’s yours,” I said. “Let’s talk about what’s actually yours, Delia. Two years of his name. Two years of his money. When was the last time he kissed you in this family’s presence the way Jude kisses me? When was the last time he reached for your hand without being asked? You’ve spent two years performing a marriage so convincingly that even you seem to have started believing it, and the moment someone asks you to prove it, you can’t.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You keep saying that,” I said. “Fair has nothing to do with it. I am asking you to do one simple thing. Tell this room, honestly, the way a wife would, what kind of husband he actually is to you behind closed doors. Not the version you perform at galas. The real one.”

Delia’s mouth opened, then closed again, her eyes darting toward Julian, who still had not said a single

word.

“He’s,” she started and then stopped.

“He’s what?” I said.

“Distant,” she said finally, the word seeming to cost her something physical to say, her arms wrapping tighter around herself. “He’s distant. He’s always been distant. I told myself it would change.

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