Chapter 188

[ 982 words ]

Katia’s POV

The board meeting had been running for two hours when my phone lit up.

I did not check it immediately. I was mid-sentence about the government contract renewal timeline, and Marcus was taking notes, and Sam was on my left, and the room was full, and I finished what I was saying before I looked down.

One message. From Gail with no caption.

Just a photo.

I looked at it under the table while Davies continued with the infrastructure brief.

Julian and Aiden on a park bench. Aiden’s head on Julian’s arm. Julian sitting completely still — the stillness of someone who has made a decision not to move and is keeping that decision completely, because the thing on his arm is asleep and matters more than whatever reason he might have had to move.

I looked at the photograph for a long time.

The board meeting continued around me. Davies was saying something about the Amsterdam node. Marcus had a question about the filing timeline. Sam said something brief and precise that settled the question. The room moved.

I looked at the photo.

Aiden’s hand rested on Julian’s sleeve. Not deliberately — children did not place their hands deliberately when they were asleep. They simply landed wherever they landed. Aiden’s hand had landed on Julian’s sleeve and stayed there, and the image of it sat in my chest in a way I could not move past or around.

I thought about Aiden at the birthday party. Running full speed toward a man he had met once and calling him the ’simulator man’ with the pure joy of a child who had found exactly the person they were looking for. I had watched it from across the garden and told myself it was just Aiden being Aiden — he ran toward most things with that energy.

I looked at the photo again.

Julian had not moved.

He was sitting completely still — the stillness of someone who had made a decision and was keeping it. The expression on his face was the unguarded one — the one he had no control over, the one I had catalogued without meaning to across a year of boardrooms and war rooms and server rooms and desert sunsets.

I had always told myself I had never met Julian before the WEG partnership.

I had been hitting that wall for a year, and lately when I hit it, something felt different. Not wrong — just thinner. Like a door I had been pressing my weight against that was beginning to give.

I did not know what I knew.

I knew what I felt.

I looked at Julian’s face in the picture. At the way he was sitting. At the quality of his stillness — not patience, not politeness. Something else. Something that looked like a man who had found something he had not expected to find and was sitting very carefully so as not to disturb it.

I thought about it, always did. Three words I had sent him without thinking and had spent two days not thinking about on purpose.

I thought about Grandma Celeste saying, ’I will help you find your husband,’ with the certainty of someone who already knew where to look.

I thought about Jules.

I thought about a night in Las Vegas six years ago that I remembered in pieces and a man whose face I had never seen clearly and a marriage certificate with two names that had been sitting in my legal files since the year I had it quietly checked.

Jules.

I pressed my lips together.

I excused myself from the board meeting.

The bathroom on the executive floor was empty. I stood at the sink and ran the cold water and looked at the photograph one more time and then put my phone face down on the counter.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

I had been running a company for two years, raising a son for six, carrying a marriage certificate I could not explain and a ring I wore in a box by my bed because I did not know where else to put something that belonged to a person who had no name or face or location.

I had been telling myself for a year that I had never met Julian before the WEG partnership. But why the fuck does my sister’s husband have to look like my son?

I looked at my reflection.

It had been a wall. A necessary wall, built quickly, because the alternative – the thought that had been pressing at the edges of everything for months – was too large to look at directly while also running a company and raising a child and managing Victor Hale and not falling apart.

The alternative was sitting on a park bench in a photograph on my phone with my son asleep on his arm.

I breathed.

Once.

Twice.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.

Then I said it out loud. Not to anyone. Just to myself. Just like the version of me standing at a sink on the executive floor of IG Technologies at two thirty in the afternoon who had been circling the same thought for twelve months and had finally run out of reasons not to look at it directly.

“Okay,” I said.

Just that. One word.

I turned off the tap.

I picked up my phone.

I went back to the board meeting.

I sat down and looked at Marcus and said, “Where were we p>

He told me. I nodded. I picked up my pen.

The meeting continued.

Under the table, my phone was face down with the photograph on the screen, and the one word I had said to myself in the bathroom was sitting somewhere in my chest, quiet and decided and waiting for whatever came next.

Okay.

Okay.

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