My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 329

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Is he your husband?

Delia POV

The taxi stopped outside my parents’ house at four minutes past midnight, and I sat in the back seat staring at the lit windows of the front room like a woman who had run out of every other option and arrived here last, which was exactly what I was.

I had nothing with me.

Not a bag, not a change of clothes, not even my phone charger, because I hadn’t been given the time to pack any of it. Katia had told us both to leave, standing in the middle of that house like she owned it, like two years of my life in those rooms meant absolutely nothing, and Julian had looked at her and then looked at me and then picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and walked out the front door without a single word. No argument. No fight. Not even a backwards glance in my direction.

He just left.

And I had stood there watching the door close behind him, and something in me refused to accept it, refused to pick up my things and follow him out like a woman who had already decided she had lost, because I hadn’t lost; this was my house, I lived here, and I had a right to be standing in that hallway, and I told Katia exactly that. I told her she had no authority here. I told her Julian would hear about this. I told her she could not walk into someone else’s home and simply decide who stayed and who didn’t.

Katia had listened to all of it without saying a single word back. And then she called security.

Two men in uniforms appeared from somewhere, and their hands were not rough but not gentle either, just professional and efficient, and then I was outside and the door was closing and I was standing on the front step of a house I had called mine for two years with nothing in my hands and nowhere to go.

I paid the driver with the card I had in my jacket pocket and got out and stood on the pavement outside my parents’ house at midnight in whatever I had thrown on that morning, because that was the only thing I had. My jacket and my phone, which had twelve percent battery and no charger. That was the sum total of everything I had managed to keep hold of while two security guards walked me out of my own life.

I rang the bell.

my father The front room light stayed on. I heard the television drop in volume, then footsteps, and then opened the door, and the look on his face when he saw me standing there was the look of a man who had been hoping for a quiet evening and understood immediately that he was not going to get one.

“Delia,” he said.

I walked past him into the house without saying anything, because if I opened my mouth before I was sitting down, I was going to fall apart in the doorway, and I refused to do that on a pavement.

Martha was on the sofa, still in her dressing gown, a cup of something warm in her hands, the television running low in the corner. She looked up when I came in, and her face went through three expressions in

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the space of a second, surprise, confusion, and then something that settled into alarm as she took in the full picture of what had walked through her front room door at midnight.

“Delia,” she said, differently from the way my father had said it, softer and more careful. What on earth What has happened to you?”

I sat down on the sofa beside her and started crying.

I hadn’t meant to. I had spent the entire taxi ride here telling myself I was done crying, that I had cried enough for one night and what I needed now was to think clearly and make a plan, and then I sat down beside my mother on the sofa where I had sat a thousand times since I was small and something in me simply gave way entirely.

Martha set her cup down and put both arms around me without saying anything, the way she had when I was seven and had fallen off my bicycle; the way she had when I was seventeen and a boy had broken my heart for the first time; the way only a mother could hold a person who had come apart in a way they didn’t entirely understand yet.

My father stood in the middle of the room and said nothing.

I cried until I didn’t have anything left to cry with, and then I sat up and wiped my face with the back of my hand, and Martha handed me a tissue from the box on the side table without being asked.

“Why are you here at this hour?” she said, gently but directly, the way Martha asked things when she already suspected the answer wasn’t going to be simple. “What happened to you?”

“Katia threw me out,” I said.

Martha blinked. “She what?”

“Katia threw me out of the house,” I said. “She told us both to leave, and Julian just, he just picked up his jacket and walked out, no argument, nothing, like it was nothing at all. And I told her she had no right, I told her I wasn’t going anywhere, and she called security on me. Two men walked me out the front door. I didn’t even get to pack anything; I had no time. They just took me out.” My voice cracked on the last part. “She threw Julian out too. And he left without even looking back at me.”

My mother stared at me.

My father cleared his throat.

“Why would Katia throw you out of your husband’s house?” he said. “Your husband’s house is your house. How is that even possible?”

“I don’t know,” I said, which was not entirely true but was the only version of the truth I could manage at midnight with mascara on my chin and no clean clothes to change into.

“She even threw Julian out,” I said. “I just don’t know what is going on anymore. I don’t understand any of it.”

My father was quiet for a moment, his hands in the pockets of his dressing gown, his eyes moving

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my face with the look he had when he was about to say something he had been sitting longer than tonight.

This goes back to the question we asked you at Katia’s penthouse,” he said. “The question none of us

an answer to. Delia, is Julian really your husband?”

I looked up at him.

“Have you ever shared a bed with that man?” he said, and his voice was not unkind, but it was not going to let me out of the question either. “Because I have sat across from him at more dinners than I can count, and I have never once seen him warm up to you. Not the way a husband warms to a wife. Not the way a man looks at a woman he has chosen. That man has always been distant with you, and I noticed it the first time I met him, and I told myself it wasn’t my business, and now my daughter is on my sofa at midnight in yesterday’s dress with nothing in her hands, and I think it is my business. Is he your

husband?”

The question sat in the room exactly the way it had sat at Katia’s penthouse, heavy and unanswered, the kind of question that didn’t get smaller the longer you left it.

“That’s not important right now,” I said. “What is important is that I’ve been thrown out of my own home and I have nothing, not even a toothbrush, and I need to figure out how to get back in.”

“Delia-”

“I’ll go back,” I said to my mother more than my father now, because my mother was the one still sitting beside me, and my father was the one asking questions I didn’t have answers to. “I’ll go back in the morning. I’ll say I’m going to collect my things. That’s all I need, just a reason to get back through the door, and then I can figure out the rest from the inside.”

My father looked at my mother, the look they exchanged across a room when they had both decided something but had not yet agreed on who was going to say it, and then, without another word, he turned and walked out of the front room, his footsteps moving down the hall toward the bedroom, the sound of a man who had run out of questions for one evening.

Martha watched him go.

Then she turned back to me, and her face had settled into something tired and careful, the face of a woman who had her own thoughts about what she had just heard and had decided tonight was not the night to say them.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Go to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

I nodded because there was nothing left to say and walked down the hall to my childhood bedroom, the room I had spent years trying to leave behind, and pushed open the door.