Chapter 173

[ 1,187 words ]

Celeste’s POV

I refilled our cups and let the quiet settle before I asked.

“Aiden’s father,” I said. “Tell me about him p>

Katia looked at her tea for a moment. I had expected hesitation. What I got instead was something more like resignation — the exhale of someone who had been carrying a story for so long that they had almost forgotten what it felt like to put it down.

“I went to Las Vegas when I was twenty,” she said. “There was a racing competition. The biggest underground event of the year. I went to race.” She paused. “I won. And then I went to celebrate p>

She held her cup in both hands.

“I met two men that night. I don’t remember much about either of them — I was given something I shouldn’t have been given. A drink that had been tampered with. I didn’t know that until much later.” She looked up. “I know I went to bed with one of them. And I know that the next morning I was so ashamed that I didn’t even look at him. I dressed in the dark. I didn’t look at his face. I ran out of his hotel suite and went straight back to my own hotel p>

I said nothing. I simply listened.

“It was only when I got back to my room that I noticed the ring,” she said. “On my left hand. A ring I had not been wearing the night before.” She paused. “I ran back to his hotel. The suite was empty. He had already checked out p>

“And the ring p>

“I kept it,” she said. “I didn’t know what else to do with it. I thought at first it was just a ring, something that had ended up on my finger during a night I couldn’t fully remember.” She set her cup down. “But then I found the marriage certificate with my name on it, not my real name. Kat. His name is Jules. No surnames. Just those two names and a Nevada county seal p>

She looked at her hands.

“The marriage was valid,” she said. “I had a lawyer check it, years later, through a proxy so nobody would know it was me asking. Fully registered. Legally binding.” She almost laughed. “I was married to a man named Jules whose face I had never seen and whose surname I didn’t know.” She paused. “I didn’t know where to start looking. Jules is not a name you can search. And I hadn’t given my real name either — I put Kat on the certificate. Not Katia. Kat p>

She was quiet for a moment.

“And the ring,” I said carefully. “You kept it p>

“I kept it,” she said. “Although I barely wear it. It’s worth more than anything I’ve ever owned — I had it valued privately a few years ago. The woman who looked at it went very still and told me she had never seen anything like it in thirty years of working with estate jewellery.” She looked at me. “She said it was worth over five hundred billion. I thought she had made an error p>

“She hadn’t,” I said quietly.

Katia looked at me. Just briefly. Then away.

“Describe it to me,” I said. “The ring p>

She looked at her hands again, as if she could see it there even though she was not wearing it.

“The band is silver,” she said. “Not new silver. Old silver — smooth and heavy, sculpted in a style that belongs to another era. It does not shine the way modern silver shines. It has weight. History.” She paused. “The stone is large. Deep red. The colour of fire when it has all its colours at once — not one red but all of them layered.” She looked up. “It does not sparkle the way you would expect something that valuable to sparkle. It glows. Slowly. Like something alive.” She paused. “The craftsmanship is intricate. Elegant. The kind of work that does not announce itself – it just is. I searched for it online when I first had it valued. I found nothing. Not one piece that resembled it. Not one reference. As if it does not exist in any public record anywhere p>

I held very still.

I knew that ring.

I had placed it in Julian’s hands myself when he was twenty-one years old. I had told him then clearly that he would give that ring to his wife. The woman who would carry the Windsor name. The ring had been in this family for generations, and it was not decoration. It was a declaration. You gave it to the woman you chose, and in doing so, you told the world and yourself that she was yours completely.

Julian had taken it from me solemnly and said he understood.

And then six years ago he had come home from Las Vegas without it and told me it was lost.

It wasn’t lost; he gave it to someone he didn’t remember.

He had given it to this woman — this woman sitting across from me eating the cookies I had made myself, who had saved my life in a park twelve years ago and never known who I was — on a night neither of them could remember, in a ceremony neither of them had planned.

I sat with that.

Katia was Julian’s wife.

She had been Julian’s wife for six years.

And Julian was currently married to her sister.

This was…complicated. This was a situation of extraordinary proportions, and it needed to be handled with the care that only a very few people in this world were equipped to give it. Julian had to be told. But not by me — not yet. He needed to arrive at this himself. He was already arriving.

And Katia.

Katia was sitting across from me describing a ring she carried in a box by her bed without knowing it was the most significant piece of jewellery in my family’s history. Without knowing that the man named Jules, whose face she had never seen, was sitting in her boardroom and her server room and her grandmother’s garden and had been sitting there for over a year, watching her with the focused, bewildered attention of a man who knew he had found what he was looking for but could not yet prove it.

This was going to require patience.

I had patience. I had been practising it for eighty years.

“Don’t worry about the ring,” I said. “And don’t worry about finding Jules.” I reached across and covered her hand with mine – the same hand she had held in a park twelve years ago. “I will help you find your husband p>

Katia looked at me.

“You will?” she said.

“I will,” I said. “But these things take time. And in the meantime—” I picked up the teapot. “Have another cup p>

She looked at me for a moment longer. Then something in her face settled. The composure she wore everywhere softened just slightly — not gone, just resting.

She held out her cup.

We drank our tea.

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