Chapter 121

[ 1,105 words ]

Delia’s POV

I saw the first Dubai post at seven in the morning.

I was in bed, half asleep, doing what I always did when I couldn’t sleep, which was scroll through my phone pretending I wasn’t looking for something specific. I was absolutely looking for something specific.

His Instagram had been silent since France. Two posts. Hands at a restaurant. Hands at a jazz bar. Both of them had broken the internet for forty-eight hours and then settled into the permanent record of Julian Windsor doing something nobody could explain.

The desert post stopped me cold.

Two shadows on a dune. Heads together. The Dubai location tag. No caption just like France.

I sat up in bed.

What the fuck!

I zoomed in. Two people; that much was obvious. One taller, which of course was my fucking husband Julian; it had to be Julian, the height and the shoulders. The other, smaller, slender, their shadow leaning into his like it belonged there. Like it had always been there. Like this was not a business trip at all.

I screenshotted it. I stared at it for ten minutes. I told myself it was nothing.

I knew it was not nothing.

The Burj Khalifa post came two days later, and the damn picture nearly took the air out of my lungs.

A dinner table. Two plates. Two wine glasses. A candle. And there — at the bottom right corner of the frame — a woman’s evening bag and a necklace. Old silver. Delicate. The kind of piece you didn’t buy at an airport or a hotel gift shop. The kind of piece someone had chosen specifically for someone specific.

Holy shit.

I got out of bed. I walked to the kitchen. I put the kettle on because I needed something to do with my hands and stood there staring at my phone while the water boiled.

Who was she?

That was the question. That was the only question. Julian had never — not once in eight months of marriage, not once in the year of their engagement — posted anything personal. Not a meal. Not a view. Not a moment. The man was a ghost online, and suddenly from Dubai he was posting intimate dinners and desert shadows like some lovesick boy on holiday.

Who the fuck is she?

I thought about Seraphina. No — Seraphina was all flash and presence; she would never let a photograph of her exist without her face in it. Chloe? Too expensive and sassy, too obvious.

I thought about who was in Dubai.

The WEG expansion trip. Julian’s team. And I pulled up my emails, scrolling back through three weeks of correspondence I had been tracking with the focused attention of a woman who had decided that information was her only currency – the IG Technologies team. The Dubai expansion launch.

Katia.

Katia was in Dubai.

I put the phone down on the counter.

I picked it back up.

I opened every photo Julian had posted and looked at them properly. Really looked. The restaurant in France — whose hand was that on the table? Elegant. No rings. Long fingers. The jazz bar — two hands, one over the other; the contact deliberate and warm.

The desert shadows. The dinner for two.

My sister.

Fucking hell.

I didn’t have proof. I had a circumstance and a feeling in my gut that had been building since the Invisible Shield launch when I watched Julian forget a sentence because Katia walked into a room. Since the Windsor dinner when he spent forty minutes watching his grandmother talk to her like she was the most interesting person he had ever encountered. Since every room they had ever been in together and the specific gravity of it, the way everything quietly reorganised itself around the two of them without either of them appearing to notice.

I had been telling myself for months that I was imagining it.

I was not imagining it.

I called Mama.

She answered on the second ring. I didn’t say hello.

“He’s with Katia,” I said. “In Dubai. It’s her in the photos p>

Mama didn’t say anything right away.

“Delia p>

“Don’t. Don’t tell me I’m being paranoid. Don’t tell me to try harder or wear a better dress. He is in Dubai with my sister, Mother! And he is posting her on his Instagram like she is—” My voice cracked. I pulled it back together through sheer will. “Like she is the woman he chose p>

Mama was quiet for a long moment. “You don’t know it’s her p>

“I know,” I said. “I can’t prove it, but I know.” I looked at the necklace in the Burj Khalifa photo. Old silver. Filigree. I had seen Katia’s jewellery before. At events. At dinners. “I have seen that necklace p>

More silence.

“Mother,” I said. “Say something p>

“I’ll call Katia,” Martha said.

“Don’t.” The word came out harder than I intended. “Don’t call her. Don’t warn her. Don’t—” I stopped. Breathed. “Just don’t p>

I hung up.

I stood in the kitchen of a house that had never been mine, in a marriage that had never been real, holding my phone with a photo of my husband’s dinner for two with a woman who was very possibly my sister, and I felt something complete itself in my chest that had been building for a long time.

Not heartbreak. I wasn’t sure I had the right to call it that.

Fury. Clean, cold, absolute fury. At Julian for making me invisible. At Katia for—

I stopped that thought. Katia hadn’t done anything I could name. Not yet.

But this wasn’t over.

I went to the study. I sat at Julian’s desk — the one he had told me I was not welcome at, the one where he had looked at me and said, ’You are nothing to me but a pretence wife’ — and I opened my laptop.

I had been patient.

I had been watching and waiting and filing things away and being patient.

I was done being patient.

I opened the folder I had been building for three months.

Kat. Jules. Six years. Las Vegas.

I started reading.

There was something in here. Something that connected all of it. I didn’t have it yet, but I was going to find it, and when I did, when I understood exactly what my husband was hiding and exactly what my sister knew or didn’t know, I was going to decide very carefully what to do with it.

Julian wanted to play games.

Fine.

I had been in this house long enough to learn from the best.

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