My Accidental Billionaire Husband (Katia and Julian) novel Chapter 91

~Delia~

My mother was already at the door when I pulled into the driveway.

She had that quality of always being positioned correctly. At events, at dinners, at the entrance of her own home at midnight when her youngest daughter arrived unannounced with something on her face that required tea and an audience. She stood in the light of the doorway in her robe and her reading glasses, and she looked at me the way she had looked at me my entire life – like I was a problem she was confident she could solve.

I had always found it comforting.

Tonight I was not sure it was going to be enough.

“Come in,” she said. She put her arm around my shoulders and steered me inside with the practised efficiency of a woman who had managed difficult evenings for forty years. “I’ve made tea. Sit.”

My mother’s kitchen at midnight was a specific kind of familiar – the particular smell of it, the way the light above the stove cast everything in warm yellow, and the faint sound of the house settling around us. I had grown up in this kitchen. I had eaten breakfast here every morning of my childhood and complained about school and argued with Katia and watched my mother move through it with the brisk authority of someone who considered the kitchen her operational headquarters.

I sat.

Mama poured. She set the cup in front of me and sat across from me and folded her hands on the table and looked at me with the focused attention she reserved for situations that required her full strategic capacity.

“Tell me,” she said.

So I told her.

Not everything I was careful about what I gave my mother and had been careful for years because Mama was a woman who took information and used it, and not always in the ways you intended when you handed it over. I told her about the confrontation in the study. About what I had said and what Julian had said back. I told her about Katia – about the way Julian looked at her, the way every room they were both in had a specific gravity that pulled him toward her without him appearing to notice he was being pulled.

I told her Julian was going to Dubai with Katia tomorrow.

Mama listened to all of it. She did not interrupt, which was unusual for her she was a woman who liked to insert herself into narratives, to redirect them, to take the wheel. Tonight she sat with her tea, and she listened, and her expression moved through several things I watched carefully: concern, calculation, something that looked briefly like guilt and was gone before I could be sure of it, and finally settling into the particular set of her jaw that meant she had reached a conclusion and was preparing to deliver it.

“You need to try harder,” she said. I looked at her. “A new dress. A different approach. Men respond to—”

“Mother.” My voice was very quiet. “He told me tonight that I am nothing to him but a pretence wife.” I held her gaze. “Those were his exact words. Nothing to him but a pretence wife.”

Martha blinked. Something moved across her face that was not quite guilt and not quite shame and was adjacent to both. She picked up her tea.

“Men say things,” she said.

“Not Julian.” I set my cup down. “Julian says exactly what he means. Always. It is one of the only things I know for certain about him.” I looked at my mother. “He meant it.”

The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Outside a car passed on the road. The house settled.

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“Then what do you want me to say?” Mama asked. Her voice had shifted slightly – less the strategic advisor, more the mother, which happened rarely enough that I noticed it when it did.

“I want you to tell me the truth,” I said. “About Katia, About why Julian, looks at her the way he does. About why my own husband treats my sister like she is the oxygen in every room and treats me like I am the furniture.” I looked at her steadily.” Because you know something, Mother. You have always known something. I can see it every time her name comes up.”

Mama put her cup down.

She was quiet for a longer moment than I expected. Mama was not a woman who took long pauses – she moved quickly, pivoted cleanly, and had an answer for everything. The pause told me more than anything she had said.

“Your sister,” she said finally, “is a complicated subject.”

“She’s going to Dubai,” I said. “With my husband. And when they are in the same city at the same time, he stops pretending I exist entirely.” I said it and waited for a bit, jealousy written all over my face. “I need to understand why.”

Mama looked at her hands. At the table. At a point somewhere between the two. “Julian agreed to marry you,” she said. “That was a business decision. What happens – how he feels about things – that was never part of what we arranged.”

“I know that.”

“Then what do you want, Delia? Truly.”

I thought about it. Sitting in my mother’s kitchen at midnight, with Julian’s words still sitting in my chest like something cold and heavy, I thought about what I actually wanted.

Not Julian’s love. I had understood months ago that it was never going to exist. Not his warmth or his attention or the specific way he looked at Katia — I understood that was not transferable, that you could not redirect it by trying harder or wearing a different dress or being better at events.

What I wanted was simpler and more complicated than any of that.

I wanted to matter.

I wanted to not be nothing.

I wanted the one thing Julian had made very clear tonight I was never going to get from him.

“I want options,” I said.

Mama looked at me. Something shifted in her expression – the mother receding, the strategist returning. She recognised the word. Options were her language.

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“What kind of options?” she said.

“The kind that don’t depend on Julian Windsor deciding to be a different person.” I picked up my tea. “The kind I make for myself.”

My mother looked at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, she nodded.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s think.”

We sat in the kitchen until two in the morning. We drank three cups of tea each. Mama talked and I listened, and occasionally I redirected, and by the time I drove back through the dark city toward the Windsor estate, I had not found what I was looking for.

But I had found the beginning of it.

Which was, I was learning, how all the important things started.

The estate was dark when I returned. Julian’s study light was still on

–

a thin line of gold under the door at the end of the west

273

Martha person

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