My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 69

Alden Asks About the Ring

~Katia-

The school project was called My Family and Aiden had been working on it for three days with the intensity he applied to things he considered genuinely important. He had interviewed me twice; Dad once by phone and Gail via a voice note he had recorded on Sam’s phone and replayed several times to make sure he had the quotes right. He had drawn a family tree in pencil first and then gone over it in ink, which was his method for everything: draft in pencil, commit in ink, no second–guessing.

I found him at the kitchen table on Thursday evening with the project spread across the surface, photographs and drawings and his neat, careful handwriting filling three pages of card. He had his chin in his hand and he was staring at the family tree with the expression he wore when something wasn’t sitting right.

I poured myself a glass of water and sat across from him.

“Problem?” I said.

“A gap,” he said. He turned the family tree toward me. He had drawn it properly–Kensington side on the left, a space on the right that was blank except for a question mark in a small neat box. He tapped the question mark with his finger. “I don’t know what to put here.”

I looked at the question mark. I looked at my son.

“That’s your father’s side,” I said.

“I know.” He looked at it for a moment. “Mrs. Patterson said we could leave gaps if there were things we didn’t know. But I don’t like leaving gaps.” He looked up at me. “Do you know anything about his side?”

“Not much,” I said carefully. “Not yet.”

He accepted this with a small nod, filing it under incomplete data, pending. Then he looked at my hand, the one resting on the table, and tilted his head slightly the way he did when he was connecting something.

“Mum,”

,” he said. “Why do you wear a ring if you don’t have a husband around?”

I set my water glass down very slowly.

The question was asked with complete innocence, no agenda, no accusation, just the direct open curiosity of a child who had noticed something and wanted to understand it. He was six years old, and he saw everything, and he asked about the things he saw, because that was how he had always been, and I had always encouraged it, and occasionally, moments like this, paid the price for that policy.

“I do have a husband,” I said. “He’s just not around right now.”

Aiden frowned. “Why not?”

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“Because he doesn’t know about you yet. About us.” I kept my voice steady. “We got separated before I found out I was pregnant. It’s complicated.”

He thought about this with the seriousness of someone reviewing evidence. “Does he know he has a son?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“Yes. When the time is right.”

Another silence. He looked at the question mark on the family tree, then back at me. “Does he know he’s missing out?”

My throat tightened. Just once, a single involuntary clench

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“He doesn’t know what he’s missing,” I said.

Aiden considered that for a long moment. He looked at the question mark. He looked at me. He looked at the ring. “Then he’s a fool, Mum,” he said, with the calm certainty of someone stating a fact that required no further discussion.

I pulled him off his stool and into a hug so sudden and so complete that he made a sound of startled protest–a small squeak of surprise that dissolved immediately as his arms came up around my neck the way they always did, instinctive and complete.

“Mum,” he said, burying his face in my shoulder. “You’re squeezing.”

“I know.”

“Quite hard.”

“I know, baby.”

He let me squeeze for another moment before he patted my back with the patient tolerance of a child who understood that adults sometimes needed this and was willing to provide it. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “I have you. That’s more than enough.”

I held him for a little longer than I needed to.

Then I let go and ruffled his curls and told him to finish the project, and he climbed back onto his stool and went back to his ink with the composure of someone who had said what needed to be said and was now moving on.

I went to the window and looked at the city.

He’s a fool, Mum.

I stayed at the window until I was sure my face was completely normal. Then I went back to the table and helped him label the question mark side of the family tree with the only word I had: “Unknown.” For now.

He wrote it in ink without hesitating.

That night, after Aiden was asleep, I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark for a long time.

Then I did something I had not done in six years.

I took the ring off.

-I had lost weight in the first year, gained it back

It came off more easily than I expected, which shouldn’t have surprised me differently, and the fit had never been exactly right since. But it always felt fixed. Permanent. Part of the hand it lived on.

I held it in my palm. In the low light from the city outside it sat there quietly, heavy and warm, the deep red of the stone catching nothing and giving nothing back.

not at Harvard, never at Harvard, where I Six years. I had worn it through the early years of * and through Aiden’s entire life had kept it locked in a box at the bottom of my wardrobe like a secret I wasn’t ready to examine. I had worn it at the Invisible Shield launch and across the boardroom table from Julian Windsor and at my mother’s charity gala while Dad looked at it like he was seeing it for the first time. I had worn it like a fact about myself that I didn’t fully understand but had never been willing to put down.

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