My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 75

~Julian~

My grandmother had arranged the seating herself.

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I knew this because I knew her and because the seating at Windsor family dinners was always arranged by someone, and that someone was always her, and the arrangements were never accidental. Every placement at that table meant something. Every proximity was a decision. The fact that Katia Kensington was three seats to my left, separated from me by a property developer and a woman from the infrastructure fund, while Delia sat to my immediate right with her hand occasionally resting on my arm in the way she had developed for public appearances was not a coincidence.

My grandmother had done this deliberately and was currently sitting at the head of the table looking entirely innocent, which was the expression she wore when she was most pleased with herself.

I poured my wine and navigated the first course with the attention I gave to situations that required careful management, present and engaged, saying the right things to the right people while maintaining a peripheral awareness of the room that I had developed over years of events where appearing relaxed was more important than being relaxed.

Delia was performing well. That was something I had come to acknowledge with a complicated mixture of acknowledgment and discomfort; she was good at this, better than I had expected, and she did it without being told and without asking for approval. She laughed at the right moments. She deferred to me in the way that read as affection rather than arrangement. She was wearing something that photographed well and had clearly thought about what it would look like in the room before she put it

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She was, in every visible way, exactly what a Windsor wife was supposed to be.

I looked at her sometimes and thought, If this were a different life, a different arrangement, a different man, she might have been happy here. That thought was its own kind of discomfort, so I filed it away and went back to the property developer on my

left.

Three seats down, Katia was talking to my grandmother.

It had started sometime during the second course Grandma had leaned across the table to ask Katia something about the Invisible Shield architecture, and Katia had answered with the direct, unperformative specificity she brought to everything, and my grandmother’s expression had changed in the way it changed when she found something genuinely interesting rather than socially useful. After that, I stopped tracking the exact words and just watched the quality of the conversation, the way it moved, the back and forth of it, and the moments when one of them said something that made the other think before responding

My grandmother laughed at something Katia said.

Not the social laugh she deployed at events, the calibrated sound that meant “I acknowledge your attempt at humor.” A real one. Sudden and genuine and slightly surprised, like Katia had caught her off guard, which almost nobody managed to do.

I had not heard my grandmother laugh like that in inonths.

I looked back at my wine.

Beside me, Delia said something to the infrastructure fund woman that made her smile. I nodded at the appropriate moment. Across the table the property developer was talking about a development in the Gulf that I was aware of and had already assessed and found uninteresting, and I gave him enough attention to be polite while the conversation between Katia and my grandmother continued three seats away with the specific, self–contained energy of two people who had found something worth talking about and were not in any hurry to stop.

They talked for forty minutes. I know because I was watching the clock in the way you watched clocks when you were trying not to watch something else.

After dinner the room reorganized itself in the way dinner rooms did–guests moving between conversations, staff clearing plates, and the particular social fluidity of an event that had gone well enough that people wanted to stay in it. Delia was talking to a woman near the window. Aiden had been collected by a staff member and taken to a side table with dessert, where he was

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The Windser Table

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applying himself to a chocolate something with the focused contentment of a child who had decided the evening had been worth attending.

My grandmother appeared at my elbow.

“Walk with me,” she said.

It wasn’t a request. I set down my glass and walked with her into the hall, the quieter corridor that ran alongside the dining room, lit by wall sconces, the noise of the dinner reduced to a pleasant murmur through the closed door.

She walked a few steps ahead and then turned to face me with the particular composure of someone who had rehearsed this moment and was choosing to deliver it simply.

“I like her very much,” she said.

“She’s a business partner.”

My grandmother looked at me. Just looked the way she did when she was giving a sentence time to reveal how inadequate it was.

“She’s also the woman you were supposed to marry,” she said.

I said nothing.

“She talked about her company for twenty minutes, and then she asked me about the garden.” Grandma’s voice was level, almost private. “Not to be polite. Because she was actually curious.” She paused and then went on. “Do you know how many people ask about the garden, Julian? People who are actually curious?”

I didn’t answer.

“She’s remarkable,” she said. “I think you know that.” She looked at me for another moment. “I think you’ve known it since the first time you were in a room together.”

“Grandma-”

“I’m not asking you to do anything.” She put one hand briefly on my arm, light, a touch, the Windsor version of warmth. “I’m simply telling you what I observed this evening. You may do with that information whatever you like.” She turned back toward the dining room. “Though I’d suggest you do it thoughtfully.”

She walked back through the door.

I stayed in the hall for a moment, the dinner murmur on one side and the quiet corridor on the other. Then I pushed the door open and went back into the room.

Katia was at the side table with Aiden. He had finished the chocolate something and had apparently decided that the woman beside him was now responsible for hearing about cephalopods, based on the expression on her face, that particular blend of surprise and engagement that Aiden produced in people regularly and reliably. Katia was listening to him with one hand resting on the back of his chair, her attention entirely his, unbothered by the room around them.

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