My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 348

No Compensation

~Martha~

I had called ahead before arriving at the Windsor estate, which was more courtesy than I felt Celeste Windsor deserved after everything my family had just learned, but I had not survived four decades in this city’s social circles by burning bridges before I understood exactly what I was dealing with.

She received me in the same front room where I imagined she received everyone she considered beneath a proper introduction, seated in a high–backed chair with her hands folded in her lap, watching me the way a woman watched a stray dog that had wandered too close to her porch.

“Martha,” she said. “I understand you have something you would like to discuss.”

“Julian fooled us both,” I said, sitting down across from her without waiting to be invited. “He was never married to Delia. Not really. It was a contract. An arrangement. He told her from the very beginning he already had a wife, that he had no intention of divorcing his wife, and that Delia would simply be playing a role for the sake of appearances.”

Celeste did not look surprised.

That, more than anything else, told me everything I needed to know about how long she had already understood the truth of it.

“I am aware,” she said simply.

“Aware,” I repeated. “You knew, and you let my daughter live under that roof for two years believing she was building something real.”

“I did not let anything happen,” Celeste said, her voice carrying the same even, calm quality it always did, the tone of a woman who had never once in her life felt the need to raise it to make a point. “I found out considerably later than you seem to assume, and by the time I understood the shape of it, the arrangement was already in place. There was nothing for me to unmake.”

“There is nothing you can do,” I said, not quite a question.

“If Delia agreed to a contract,” Celeste said, “then there is nothing I can do. A contract is a contract, Martha. She signed it with her eyes open, whatever she chose to believe about what might come of it afterward. There was a wedding, small, family only, nothing for the press to record. Julian was clear with her from the outset that he already has a wife and a family, and that has not changed and will not change.”

The word “family” landed somewhere in my chest that I was not prepared for.

“Who is the wife?” I said.

Celeste looked at me for a long moment, something almost anused passing behind her eyes.

“If you want to know who Julian’s wife is,” she said, “why do you not go ask him yourself?”

“I am asking you.”

“And I am telling you where the answer actually lives,” she said. “It is not mine to give away, Martha. If Julian wanted the two of us sitting here discussing his personal life, he would have joined us for tea.

I sat back in my chair, my hands tightening slightly in my lap, and decided the direct approach had run its course. “The Windsors have taken two years of my daughter’s life,” I said. “Two years she could have spent building

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something real with someone who actually wanted her. I would like to know if the family intends to compensate her for what she has lost.”

“Compensate her,” Celeste repeated.

“Yes,” I said. “Surely a family with your resources understands that two years is not nothing. She gave up her privacy, her reputation, and her chance at an actual marriage, all to sit in that house playing a role your grandso invented for his own convenience.‘

Celeste considered this for a moment, and I let myself believe, briefly, that I had found an opening,

“If there was a provision in the contract Delia signed with Julian,” she said, “addressing compensation in the event the arrangement ended, then that provision would apply, and she would receive exactly what was written into it. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“And if there was no such provision,” I said.

“Then Delia walks away with nothing,” Celeste said, “and there is nothing I can do about that. I did not write the contract. I did not negotiate its terms. Whatever your daughter agreed to, she agreed to on her own, presumably believing she understood exactly what she was signing.”

I stared at her.

“You cannot possibly believe that is fair,” I said.

“Fairness was never a term of the agreement, Martha,” Celeste said. “Only the contract was. If you would like to discuss fairness, I would suggest you discuss it with your daughter, who signed a document promising two years of silence and appearance in exchange for a life she could not have earned any other way. That was her choice. It remains her choice to have made.”

I stood up.

There was nothing left in that room for me, no leverage I had not already tried and failed to find purchase with, no soft place in the old woman’s composure that might yield something better than what I had already been given.

I left without saying goodbye, and I did not look back to see whether she watched me go.

The drive home gave me too much time to sit with everything that had just happened, the calm, immovable certainty in Celeste Windsor’s voice as she dismantled every argument I brought into that room. I had gone in believing there would be some version of decency I could appeal to, some sense of family obligation that might move a woman like her to offer Delia something, anything, in exchange for two years of her life spent playing a role invented entirely for the Windsors‘ convenience.

There had been nothing.

I thought about the early days of the arrangement. I knew they wanted Katia, but with Katia pregnant by a stranger whom, until this day, we do not know, I went to Celeste and proposed they take Delia instead. And when Celeste agreed, I was over the moon, and Delia glowed when she learned that Julian Windsor would marry her, and I was so relieved and proud, believing my daughter had finally secured the kind of life I had always wanted for her. I had told my friends. I had let the news circulate through every circle that mattered to me, had watched the envy on other mothers‘ faces when they realized my daughter would be the one carrying the Windsor name.

None of it had ever been real.

I pulled into my own driveway and sat there for a moment before going inside, gathering myself, trying to decide what I was actually going to tell Delia when she asked how the meeting had gone. She was going to ask. She had

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been waiting all morning for some version of good news, some indication that her mother had gone to fight for her the way her father had refused to.

I did not have good news to give her.

I walked inside and found her in the kitchen, exactly where I expected, sitting at the table with a cup of tea she had clearly stopped drinking some time ago, the surface gone cold and filmy.

“Well,” she said, looking up. “What did she say?”

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