My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 80

The Question

~Katia~

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I made pasta because it was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays I made pasta, and Aiden expected it. The routine was one of the things I had built into our life–not rigidity, but anchor points, small reliable things that said this is stable, this is ours, and nothing has changed.

I stood at the stove and stirred and listened to Aiden in the bathroom running the tap for longer than necessary, which meant he was looking at something in the mirror or thinking about something while the water ran, both of which were habits he had developed independently and which I had learned not to interrupt.

He came to the table in his pajamas with his hair damp and his face clean and that particular expression he wore when he had been thinking about something specific and had decided dinner was the right time to raise it.

I put the pasta down. I sat across from him. I poured his water and my wine, and we both started eating, and I waited because with Aiden you always waited. He would get there in his own time, and pressing him only made him more deliberate.

He twirled pasta around his fork with the careful concentration he applied to things he wanted to do properly.

Then: “Mum.”

“Mm.”

“Julian looks like me.”

I set my fork down very quietly.

“Does he,” I said. Not a question. A space for him to continue.

“Yes.” He said it with the matter–of–fact certainty of someone reporting an observable fact. “I noticed at the simulator. His jaw is the same as mine. And the way he does this-” He tilted his head slightly left, the specific degree of it, and looked at me. “He does that too.”

I looked at my son across the table.

It was true that Aiden looked nothing like me. He never had. From the moment he was born I had looked at his face and found nothing of myself in it—not my eyes, not my nose, not the shape of my mouth or the angle of my cheekbones. He was entirely his own person, entirely his own face, and I had spent six years looking at it and wondering, in the quiet moments, whose face it actually was.

I had not had an answer.

Until today the question had simply lived with me, unanswered, the way some questions did not urgently, just present, a small persistent wondering that I had made peace with not resolving.

“Lots of people have similar features,” I said. “It’s just how faces work sometimes.”

Aiden looked at me with the patience of a child who had already considered and rejected that explanation. “Mrs. Patterson says everyone is unique. That no two people look exactly alike unless they’re twins.” He twirled more pasta. “Julian and I are not twins.”

“No,” I agreed. “You’re not.”

“So why does he look like me?”

The kitchen was very quiet. Outside the window, Manhattan was doing its evening thing–sirens somewhere distant, the low hum of the city that never fully stopped. I had cooked in this kitchen a hundred times with that hum in the background, and it had never felt as loud as it did right now.

“I don’t know, baby,” I said. Which was the most honest answer I had.

1/3

The Question

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Aiden ate for a moment in silence. I watched him and tried to look like I wasn’t watching him. I had been looking at his face for six years, the curls, the jaw, and the specific way he tilted his head when he was thinking, and I had never been able to place it. Never been able to find the source of it. The face that had made him was a mystery I had carried quietly, without resolution, for

six years.

I was not going to resolve it at a pasta dinner on a Tuesday.

“He’s nice,” Aiden said.

“Is he.”

“Yes. He explained the simulator properly. Not the baby version.” He looked up. “Adults usually give me the baby version.”

“I know.”

“He didn’t.” He considered this. “He asked good questions too. Well–he asked what my name was. But the way he asked it was like he actually wanted to know. Not just to be polite.”

I said nothing.

“Some adults ask your name to be polite,” Aiden continued, with the analytical calm of someone who had been cataloging adult behavior for six years and had reached several conclusions. “You can tell because they don’t use it afterward. They collect it and put it away.” He twirled his fork. “Julian used it. He said anytime, Aiden when I said thank you. He used the name.”

“That’s very observant,” I said.

“I know.” He ate another mouthful. “I liked him.”

I looked at my pasta. At the steam rising from it. At the scratch on the kitchen table that had been there since Aiden was four and had decided to test whether a toy car could leave a mark. It could.

“I’m glad,” I said.

Another silence. I thought it was over. I had begun to believe we had reached the natural end of the conversation and I could breathe properly again when Aiden set his fork down with the careful deliberateness of someone who had been working up to the main point and had arrived.

“Mum,” he said. “If you don’t mind, and I want to check if you mind first, I would like to spend more time with Aunty Gail’s

brother.”

I looked at him.

He looked back. His eyes were very steady, very direct, with that quality of clear–eyed honesty that he haffhad since he was old enough to form sentences. He wasn’t asking out of impulse or excitement. He had thought about it. He had decided it was something he wanted and had determined that the correct approach was to ask my permission before pursuing it.

Six years old.

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