My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 81

She Can’t Sleep

~Katia ~

3 AM.

I knew the time before I looked at my phone because 3 AM had its own specific quality in this apartment, the particular depth of quiet, the way the city noise reduced to almost nothing without quite reaching silence, and the way the darkness sat differently than at midnight or 2 AM. I had been awake at 3 AM enough times to know it by feel.

I got up. No point lying there. I had been conducting a largely unsuccessful negotiation with sleep for the past two hours, and sleep was winning by simply refusing to show up.

The kitchen was cold in the way kitchens were cold at 3 AM. I turned on the small light above the stove, enough to see by but not enough to feel like I was committing to wakefulness, and I got the cereal from the cupboard and the milk from the fridge, and I sat on the counter the way I had been sitting on counters since I was a child, back against the cupboard, legs dangling, bowl in hand.

I ate three spoonfuls.

Then I opened my laptop.

I told myself I was going to check the Dubai logistics brief. It was a reasonable thing to check at 3 AM, the kind of document that benefitted from a second reading when your brain was too tired to do anything except absorb information. That was a completely reasonable explanation for opening my laptop at 3 AM after a day in which I had watched Julian Windsor crouch beside my son at a racing simulator.

I opened a browser.

I typed: Julian Windsor.

The results were what they always were, extensive, detailed, and entirely impersonal. WEG press releases. Business coverage. Financial filings. Third–party analyses of the Windsor Empire Group’s market position, acquisition history, and projected expansion. Julian Windsor the CEO, Julian Windsor the business entity, and Julian Windsor the financial fact. Forty–seven pages of results and not a single one that told me what he looked like eating breakfast or whether he laughed before or after the thing was funny or what his voice sounded like when he wasn’t performing authority.

No interviews. No personal profiles. No social media presence of any kind. The man had constructed his public existence with the same deliberate precision he applied to everything else, enough information to be credible, nothing that made him human.

I scrolled anyway.

Page three. Page five. Page eight. I read things I already knew and things that were adjacent to things I already knew and things

already that were so tangentially related to Julian Windsor that the algorithm had simply run out of ideas and was offering me whatever

it could find.

And then, on page eleven, buried between a Monaco Grand Prix sponsor listing and a society column mention from four years

ago: an image.

I clicked it.

Grainy. Taken from a distance, at an event in the Monaco paddock, judging by the background and the specific geometry of those hospitality structures. A crowd of people, the image slightly blurred by distance and compression. And there, slightly to the left of centre, a tall man in a dark suit. The suit was good; even at this resolution and distance, you could tell the suit was good. The posture was distinctive, Head slightly turned, face obscured by both the angle and the quality of the image, just enough of a profile visible to confirm human features without confirming which ones.

I stared at the image for a long time.

I was looking for something. I knew I was looking for something. I just couldn’t name it clearly enough to admit I was looking

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for il, so I kept it vague, looking, just looking, the way you looked at things when you weren’t ready to say what you were hoping

to see.

The jaw was obscured. The face was obscured. The image was four years old and taken from forty feet away and had been compressed by whatever third–rate image hosting site had kept it alive for this long.

I closed the laptop.

I ate another spoonful of cereal.

I thought about Aiden at the dinner table. Julian looks like me. Said with the calm certainty of a six–year–old who had noticed something true and wanted it explained. His jaw is the same as mine. And the way he does this

I opened the laptop again.

The image was still there. The tall man in the good suit, face turned away, profile half–visible. I looked at the visible portion of the jaw. The angle of it. The specific sharpness that was either actually there or that I was constructing from the grainy pixels of a badly compressed photograph at 3 AM when I had not slept enough and was sitting on a kitchen counter eating cereal I wasn’t tasting.

I closed the laptop again. Harder this time. Not slamming, I never slammed things, but with a deliberateness that said I was done.

I poured the cereal down the sink.

I watched it disappear and thought about the fact that I was a twenty–six–year–old woman who ran a billion–dollar company and had won races in three countries and had built something from nothing with my own hands, and I was standing at a kitchen sink at 3 AM pouring cereal away because I couldn’t sleep because a six–year–old had noticed a resemblance and I didn’t know

what to do with it.

I ran a bath.

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