My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 76

Gail Connects a Bot

~Katia~

The dinner wound down the way good evenings do, slowly, reluctantly, in stages. Guests collected their coats in ones and twos, exchanging the last conversations of the night with the particular warmth that came from wine and candlelight and the specific kind of room that made people feel like they had spent their evening somewhere that mattered.

Aiden had fallen asleep in the side room. He had done it with efficiency, finished his dessert, listened to three more facts he wanted to share with the staff member who had been patiently receiving them, and then simply put his head down on his folded arms and gone. One of the Windsor staff had found a blanket from somewhere. I had looked in on him twice, and both times he was completely, profoundly asleep with the abandon of someone who had decided the evening was complete and was not going to wait for the adults to agree.

I was collecting my bag when Gail appeared at my elbow.

She had been at the dinner, of course she had; it was her family’s event, and we had exchanged the warm, easy hello of people who saw each other regularly enough that a formal greeting would have been strange. We had talked briefly during the networking hour and not at all during dinner, which was fine. Gail and I didn’t need to be next to each other to be in the same

room together.

But she had the look now, the careful one, the one she wore when she had been thinking about something for a while and had decided, after working through it, to say it.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” she said. “Just quickly.”

We stepped into the corridor. The same one Julian had walked down with Grandma Celeste an hour ago, though I didn’t know that. The sconces were warm, and the dinner noise was reduced to a murmur, and Gail stood across from me with her hands folded and the expression of someone choosing words with more care than usual.

“I want to ask you something,” she said. “And I want you to know that if you’d rather I didn’t ask it, I won’t be offended.”

“Ask,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment. Then: “Has anyone ever told you that Aiden looks like—”

She stopped.

Something crossed her face, a thought catching up with itself, a reconsideration arriving before the sentence was finished. She pressed her lips together and shook her head slightly, as if overruling herself.

“Never mind,” she said. “It’s probably nothing.”

The corridor was very quiet.

I looked at Gail. At the careful expression that had replaced the one she’d been wearing when she started the sentence. At the way she had stopped herself, not because she had forgotten what she was going to say, but because she had remembered something that made her not want to say it.

“Like who?” I said.

“Kat-”

“Gail. Like who?”

She met my eyes. Hers were steady and warm and doing that careful thing they did when she was trying to protect something without lying about it.

“It’s nothing,” she said again. “I was going to say something silly. Forget it.” She touched my arm briefly. “I’ll get Aiden’s coat.”

She walked back through the door before I could say anything else.

1/3

Gail Connects a Dot

+25 Bonus

I stood in the corridor.

The sconces hummed faintly Somewhere in the dining room a glass clinked and someone laughed, and the evening continued its slow, elegant wind–down, I stood in the middle of it and did not move for a moment that was probably ten seconds and felt considerably longer.

Has anyone ever told you that Aiden looks like

Like who.

I knew what the end of that sentence was. Not because Gail had said it; she hadn’t. She had stopped herself deliberately; she had decided mid–sentence that she didn’t want to finish it, but because I knew my son’s face and I had been in a room tonight with a man who had the same jaw and the same hands and the same tilt of the head exactly left when he was thinking, and I had been not–thinking about it for three hours with the focused energy of someone who had decided not to think about a thing and was thinking about it constantly.

I was not ready for the end of that sentence.

I was not ready for what it meant if the end of that sentence was what I thought it was.

I picked up my bag from the table in the corridor and went to collect Aiden.

He was heavy with sleep, the boneless weight of a child who had gone completely under and had no intention of returning. I got his coat on him like someone who had done this hundreds of times, and he stirred just enough to put his arms around my neck and then went back under, face pressed to my shoulder, breathing deep and even.

Sam was waiting at the entrance with the car already pulled round. She took one look at me over Aiden’s sleeping head and said nothing. She opened the back door, and I got in with him, and she closed it and went around to the driver’s side, and we pulled away from the Pembridge into the city without a word being exchanged.

Sam didn’t push. She never did when she could see that I was somewhere inside my own head that didn’t have room for company yet. It was one of the things about her that I had never adequately thanked her for and probably never would because the moment I tried, she would tell me to stop being sentimental and hand me a coffee.

Aiden shifted against my side. His curls were warm under my hand. I looked at the city moving past the window, the lights, and the bridges, the particular way Manhattan looked at night from a car when you were tired and thinking about something you weren’t ready to think about.

Has anyone ever told you that Aiden looks like-

Like who, Gail.

Say it. Finish it. Be wrong about it.

The lights blurred slightly. I blinked. Outside, the city was indifferent and enormous and entirely unhelpful, which was usually one of the things I found most useful about it, and tonight was not.

I pressed my hand gently to Aiden’s curls and felt him breathe.

It’s nothing. Gail said it was nothing. People saw resemblances in children all the time–it was something the mind did, pattern -matching across faces, finding connections that weren’t there. Aiden looked like Aiden. He looked like himself. He had his own jaw and his own hands and his own way of tilting his head, and it didn’t mean anything that a man across a dinner table had the

same-

I stopped.

I looked out the window.

It was not nothing.

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