My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 85

Delivered

~Katia~

Marcus sent confirmation at 6:47 AM Thursday.

Fifteen letters dispatched. Delivered via registered courier and electronic service simultaneously. Read receipts confirmed on eleven of fifteen as of this timestamp. The remaining four are expected within the hour. The spokesperson has been briefed. She is ready when you are.

I read it over my first coffee while Aiden ate his breakfast across the table, methodically working through his toast in the way he worked through everything, left to right, no crusts until the end, always the end. He was telling me something about a boy at school named Tyler who had claimed to know everything about Formula One but had got the constructors‘ championship wrong by two years, and I was listening with one ear and reading Marcus’s message with both eyes.

“Mum,” Aiden said.

“Mm.”

“You have your work face on.”

“I’m always this face.”

“No. Your work face is different from your normal face. Your normal face looks at me. Your work face looks past me.” He picked up his toast. “It’s fine. I’m used to it.”

I put the phone down and looked at my son directly. “Tell me about Tyler.”

He told me about Tyler. I listened properly this time to the full story, the constructors‘ championship error, Aiden’s correction of it, Tyler’s insistence, the teacher’s intervention, and the resolution. It took four minutes and required my complete attention, and by the end of it Aiden was satisfied and the toast was finished, and Marcus’s message was still on my phone but could wait until I had dropped Aiden at school.

Some things were more important than consequence delivery

Most things, actually.

By nine AM the racing forums were on fire.

Sam had set up a monitoring alert; every mention of Catwoman across twelve platforms was delivered to a dashboard she had built specifically for this week. I watched it from my office with my second coffee and the particular satisfaction of someone who had set something in motion and was now watching it move.

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The first post appeared at 7:23 AM from a woman named @SpeedQueenRacing, one of the fifteen, a reasonable driver who had posted edited footage of herself in a circuit outside Atlanta and called herself ‘Catwoman‘ for eleven days. Her post read:

I have received legal correspondence from an entity representing the individual known as Catwoman regarding my recent claims. I am taking this seriously and will be issuing a full statement shortly. I apologise unreservedly to the racing community.

Sam appeared in my doorway. “First one’s down.”

“I saw.”

“The forums are already-”

“I know.” I could see it on the dashboard. The thread had three hundred replies in twenty minutes. The racing community had been watching the fake Catwoman trend with a mixture of amusement and scepticism for three weeks, and now, suddenly, there was a development that changed everything – not another fake, but a response. From a legal entity. Representing the real

one.

The second apology came at 8:14 AM. Then the third at 8:31. Then two more in quick succession just before nine, both of them

1/3

Delivered

+25 Bonus

longer and more elaborate than the first the space where confidence used to be.

–

the particular verbosity of people who were frightened and were using words to fill

By ten AM, seven of the fifteen had issued public apologies or retractions.

By noon, eleven.

Each apology was different in tone and length and degree of embarrassment, but they all contained the same essential admission: they had claimed to be someone they were not, they had received correspondence that made the error of that claim very clear to them, and they were sorry. Some were sorry to the racing community. Some were sorry to Catwoman specifically, addressing the statement to a person they still couldn’t name and apologising to a ghost.

That part I found particularly satisfying.

Sam managed the dashboard from her office and sent me updates every hour with the precision of a general managing a campaign. She did not editorialise. She did not add commentary. She simply sent the numbers and the links and the timestamps and let the facts speak for themselves, which was the Sam method and which I had always appreciated.

At two in the afternoon Marcus called.

“Fourteen confirmed,” he said. “The fifteenth the woman from the supermarket car park — has gone quiet. No response to the letter, no public statement.”

“Give her until tomorrow morning,” I said.

“And if she doesn’t respond by then?”

“Then we escalate.” I looked out the window at the afternoon city. “But she’ll respond. They always respond when they

understand the alternative.”

“The spokesperson is ready,” Marcus said. “She’d like to issue the first statement this evening. She has a draft.”

“Send it to me.”

It arrived eleven minutes later. I read it three times.

It was good. It was very good. Short exactly as I had requested. Precise. The kind of sentences that had been constructed to leave no space for misinterpretation. I changed two words and sent it back.

Approved. Issue at six PM.

At six PM exactly, through the shell entity’s encrypted press channel, the spokesperson issued Catwoman’s first–ever public

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statement:

The individual known as Catwoman has raced on circuits across three continents for eight years. She has never needed anyone to race for her, speak for her, or be her. She thanks the racing community for their patience and asks that they extend the same patience to the fifteen individuals who have recently learnt the difference between a costume and a career. This matter is now

concluded.

Sam forwarded it to me with one word: Immaculate.

I read it on my phone in the car on the way to pick up Aiden from school.

The racing forums, according to the dashboard, had stopped being on fire and had become something closer to a controlled explosion – that specific quality of collective reaction when something so precisely aimed lands so precisely that there is a moment of silence before the noise catches up.

The silence lasted approximately four minutes.

Then the noise arrived.

213

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