My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 59

~Katia~

I said it in the elevator.

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Not out loud. In my head, the way you said things you couldn’t say in rooms full of people watching your face. Warm air plays tricks. I replayed the exact moment, the pause at the door, the glance back, and that one second of eye contact with Julian, and I thought, that was either the smartest thing you’ve done all week or the single most reckless.

The elevator hit the lobby. I walked out into the morning like a woman with absolutely nothing on her mind.

The WEG building deposited me onto the pavement, and the city swallowed me immediately, which was one of the things I had always loved about New York. It didn’t care. You could walk out of the most loaded room of your life, and within thirty seconds you were just another person on a pavement going somewhere. A delivery bike nearly clipped my elbow. A street vendor was arguing with a tourist about pretzel pricing. The world was completely indifferent to Julian Windsor and his boardroom and the way he had watched me leave it.

Good. That was exactly what I needed.

Sam was waiting by the car. She took one look at my face and said nothing, which was one of the many reasons I paid her what I paid her.

“Good meeting?” she asked, opening the door.

“Fine.”

“Fine like fine, or fine like you’re doing internal calculations about six different things and don’t want to discuss any of them?”

“The second one.”

“Great.” She got in on the other side. “Davies called. He wants to push back on the Frankfurt timeline.”

“He can push back all he wants. It’s twenty–two days ”

“That’s what I told him.”

“Good.”

The car pulled into traffic. I looked out the window and let the city do its thing. In my head I was still in that boardroom, Julian stayed seated when everyone else left. That folder in front of him that he never opened. The way he said the other breach, Katia, was like he was giving me the chance to say something before he did. I hadn’t taken it. I had given him weather advice instead and walked out, which in retrospect was either masterful or catastrophic, and I genuinely could not decide which.

We get better, he had said to Zane.

I hadn’t been meant to hear that. I had been at the elevator already, the doors half closed. But I had heard it. And I had stood in that elevator for three floors thinking about what it meant that Julian Windsor considered himself behind.

“School pickup at three,” Sam said, not looking up from her tablet. “Gail confirmed the aquarium.”

“I know.”

“Aiden texted her twice from Tyler’s phone.”

“I know that too.”

Sam looked up. “Are you actually fine, or are we doing the thing where you say ‘tine‘ until Thursday and then I find you eating

cereal at 3 AM?”

“I’m fine, Sam.”

To hove

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She held my gaze for one more second. Then she went back to her tablet. She always knew when to push and when to let things breathe. It was a genuine gift.

I turned back to the window The city kept moving

Fine. I was absolutely fine.

Gail was already at the school gate when we pulled up, a coffee in each hand, orange coat, and that grin. Some things were constants in a world that mostly wasn’t.

“Oat milk,” she said, extending a cup the moment I stepped out. “One sugar. Don’t thank me.”

“Thank you.”

“I said don’t.”

The school doors hadn’t opened yet, so we stood shoulder to shoulder on the pavement, watching the other parents do the school run performance: phones out, careful outfits, and the choreography of people who wanted to look like they weren’t trying. Gail watched them with me and said nothing. That was one of the things I had loved about her since Harvard. She never filled silence just to fill it.

“How was the morning?” she asked eventually.

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“Productive,” I said, which was what I always said and meant nothing.

She looked at me sideways. “You have your boardroom face on.”

“I’m always this face.”

“No. Your normal face is slightly less like you’re calculating the structural load of something heavy.” She sipped her coffee.” WEG meeting?”

“Mm.”

“How’s that going? The whole working–with–my–brother situation.” She said it lightly. The way you said something you’d been thinking about for ten minutes and were pretending you hadn’t.

I had known since Delia’s engagement ceremony that Gail was Julian’s sister. I had stood in that room and watched my best friend and whatever Julian Windsor was to me exist in the same family, and I had felt the floor tilt in a way I hadn’t told anyone about. Not even Sam. Especially not Gail.

Because here is what Gail knew: that I had almost done something catastrophically stupid with her married brother in his office and Vegas. I had told her that in a moment of weakness and wine, and she had looked at me with those careful eyes and said nothing for a very long time and then said, ‘Don’t do it again,‘ and poured us both more wine. That was it. That was the full

extent of it.

Here is what Gail did not know: everything else.

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