My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 379

egally existed. Galas, interviews, photographs where you clung to a man who barely acknowledged yo

All while the real Mrs. Windsor was somewhere else entirely, quietly living the life you spent two years pretending to have.”

I felt my jaw tighten.

“You do not know anything about what those two years actually cost me,” I said.

“I know enough,” Tessa said, leaning back in her chair, studying me the way a predator studied something it had already decided was not worth the effort of chasing. “I have spent months chasing a much more interesting mystery than you, Delia. Catwoman. A woman clever enough to hide in plain sight for years, dangerous enough to make grown men nervous, and elusive enough that even I have not managed to pin her down completely.” She smiled, thin and unkind. “And here you are. The opposite of elusive. A woman who spent two years loudly announcing an identity that was never actually hers to claim.”

“Leave,” I said.

“In a moment,” she said. “I want you to understand something first, because I’suspect nobody else in your life has had the honesty to say it to you plainly. You are not a victim in this story, Delia, whatever narrative you have been telling yourself since the truth came out. You knew, from the very first day, that the marriage was not real. You know Julian would never love you, never touch you, never see you as anything more than a convenient arrangement. You chose to let the world believe otherwise anyway, because the alternative, admitting the truth to yourself, felt worse than living the lie.”

The words landed exactly where she intended them to land, sharp and merciless, and I hated how much of what she said matched the same conclusion I had already reached alone in my apartment days earlier.

“You do not know me,” I said, though my voice had lost some of its earlier conviction

“I know enough.” Tessa said again. “I know a woman who built her entire identity around a borrowed name, and I know happens to women like that once the name gets taken away. There is nothing left underneath it. Noter Naxton of your Just an empty space where a person used to be, before she decided a tle mattered more than actually building somethin

I stood up from the table, my chair scraping loudly against the floor, several ngaty diners glancing over at the sound

“I am not staying for this,” I said

You never do,” Tessa said, unbothered, already reaching for the menu as though she hosted to arder for herself nowhit

conversation, exactly how little of a future he was actually offefffig

I had spent years chasing that certainty long after any reasonable person would have let it go.

Tessa had called it a title, and she was not entirely wrong about that either. Somewhere along the way, the fantasy I had built around Julian had stopped being about him at all and had become something else entirely, a story about who I wanted to be, the woman important enough to stand beside a man like that, the woman other people envied rather than overlooked. I had married an idea, not a person, and the idea had turned out to be exactly as hollow as everyone had apparently seen from the very beginning except me.

My phone buzzed in my bag, another notification, another headline circulating with my name attached to a story I no longer had any control over. I did not check it. I simply sat there in the quiet of the car, letting the silence settle around me instead, trying to remember the last time I had made a decision in my life that had not been built around what Julian Windsor thought of me, wanted from me, or represented to everyone watching from the outside.

I could not remember one.

That realization frightened me more than anything Tessa Sterling had said across that table, more than the headlines, more than the public humiliation still unfolding across every screen in the city. I had built two years of my inte fand perhaps longer than that if I were honest with myself, around a man who had never once asked me to build anything at all.

I finally started the car and pulled out of the lot, driving without any real destination, simply needing the motion, the illusion of moving forward even if I had no clear idea yet what forward was actually supposed to look like for a woman who had just watched the only identity she had built for herself get stripped away in public, one headline at a time.

Good day, dearest readers!

I know I’ve been spoiling you all with more than one chapter a day, and I truly appreciate your enthusiasm and suppor

Unfortunately, I’m not feeling well today, so I won’t be able to upload as many chapters as usual I kindly ask for your patience I’ll make it up to you tomorrow by uploading extra chapters.

Thank you so much for your continuous love, support, and understanding. It truly means the world to me See or all tomentosel

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