My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 344

A Question Nobody Can Answer

~Delia~

I had been staying at my parents‘ house for almost two weeks now, ever since Katia decided she had the right to throw me out of what was still, as far as I was concerned, my house.

Two weeks of sleeping in my childhood bedroom, the same walls I had spent my teenage years desperate to escape, the same window that looked out over the same narrow strip of garden my mother had never once managed to keep alive through a full summer.

Two weeks of eating breakfast across from my father, who mostly ignored me, and my mother, who mostly hovered, neither of them quite sure how to talk to a grown daughter who had shown up on their doorstep with three suitcases and no explanation that made any sense.

I woke up angry that morning, the way I had woken up angry every morning for two weeks, and I walked into the kitchen already talking before I had even reached the table.

“Mother,” I said. “I am done playing nice.”

Mama looked up from her tea.

“Dad,” I said, turning to my father, who was sitting at the head of the table reading something on his tablet, “you have to ask that daughter of yours what she did to my husband to make him give up our house.”

My father set the tablet down slowly.

“I am not going to ask anyone anything,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“During the dinner,” he said, “you were asked directly if Julian is your husband. You did not answer. Until this day, none of us knows if Julian Windsor is actually your husband, and yet you want me to go fight for you. Fight for what, exactly? Your rights? What rights? What claims do you think you have over a man whose relationship to you nobody in this family can even confirm.”

I stared at him.

“Dad, that is not fair.”

“Fair,” he repeated, standing up from the table. “You want to talk to me about fair. I have watched you stand in that dining room for weeks, letting everyone believe whatever version of events served you best, and now that it has fallen apart, you want your father to march over there and demand answers on your behalf. I am sixty years old, Delía. I do not have the energy to go fight battles I do not understand for a cause nobody can explain to me.”

He walked away from the table a few steps, then turned back.

“And you,” he said, pointing at Mama, “it would do you some good to stay out of fights you have no understanding of either. I am not going anywhere. I am not doing anything. Not until this daughter of yours tells us the truth about whether Julian Windsor is actually her husband.” He looked between the two of us. “If either of you acts without my knowledge again, without my permission, you will find yourself out of this house as well. I do not have the patience to keep playing whatever game the two of you have been running.”

Mama’s face went pale. She set her teacup down carefully, as though the sound of it against the saucer might make things worse than they already were.

“David,” she said quietly, “there is no need to speak to us that way.”

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“There is every need,” my father said, his voice sharp in a way I had rarely heard from him in my entire life. He had always been the quiet one, the one who let my mother manage the household and the family and every social obligation that came with our name, content to stay in his study with his books and his golf magazines while she orchestrated everything around him. I had never once seen him raise his voice like this, not even when I was younger and gave both of them plenty of reasons to.

“You have both been playing along with something for months,” he continued, “and I let it happen because I trusted that my wife and my daughter would not embarrass this family on purpose in front of everyone we know. But watching that dinner, watching you stand there and let Windsor humiliate you in front of a table full of people, and now watching you come down here shouting demands at breakfast without a single honest answerto give either of us, I am done pretending I do not see what is happening.”

He turned and walked toward the door of the kitchen.

The silence he left behind was worse than anything he had actually said.

Mama looked at me.

“Delia,” she said quietly, “is Julian your husband?”

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

I thought about two years of living in that house, two years of telling myself the arrangement would eventually become something real if I were patient enough, careful enough, and present enough. I thought about the ring I had worn in public, the parties, the photographs, the version of a marriage I had built entirely out of my own hope and Julian’s cold, consistent silence.

Mama waited a moment longer, her eyes searching my face for something that might have looked like an answer, and when nothing arrived, she stood up from the table without another word and followed my father out of the room, leaving me standing there alone in the kitchen with a question I still could not bring myself to answer honestly, not even to myself.

I stood there for a long time after they left, staring at the doorway they had both walked through, listening to their footsteps fade somewhere deeper into the house. I could hear the low murmur of their voices from another room. A few minutes later, my father’s tone was still sharp, and my mother’s was softer, placating, the way it always was when she was trying to smooth something over before it became a permanent fracture.

I thought about calling Julian.

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