Chapter 215

[ 1,084 words ]

Delia’s POV

I spent forty minutes trying to find the hangar.

Not because I had a plan. I want to be honest with myself about that — I did not have a plan. I had a cracked phone screen and an Instagram photograph and the fury of a woman who had been sitting still for too long and had finally decided that sitting still was no longer an option.

I started with the obvious. Julian’s company profile listed WEG’s registered properties but not personal assets. I tried the aviation authority database — private hangars were registered and theoretically traceable. I found four listings under Windsor Family Holdings, but the addresses were registered to a shell entity three layers deep, and the physical locations were not listed publicly.

I tried social media. Aviation enthusiasts sometimes photographed private airstrips. I found nothing that connected Julian Windsor to a specific location within driving distance.

I tried calling someone at WEG — a junior executive I had met at a function, someone who had been attentive in the way that suggested he would take my call. He took my call. He did not know which hangar Julian used personally. He offered to find out and call me back.

I told him not to bother.

Dead end.

Every direction I turned was a wall. Julian Windsor had built his life the way he built everything — with layers between himself and anyone who might want to find him when he did not want to be found. The private airstrips were registered to entities that were registered to other entities. The jet registrations were not public. The security team he employed did not take calls from people asking where their employer was.

I knew this about him now. He was a man who could disappear completely when he chose to, who had built systems and structures designed to make him untraceable. He had been doing it for years. The ghost wife that nobody could find. The hangars that were technically locatable but practically invisible.

He had built a life of careful invisibility.

And he had brought me into it — into his house, his name, his arrangement — and had somehow expected me to remain invisible alongside him.

I put the phone down.

I picked it up.

I looked at the Instagram photograph again. The cockpit. The woman in the left seat. The sky beyond the windshield had the particular quality of light that said they were well above cloud level, somewhere over the ocean or close to it.

He had not come home last night.

He had not come home, and then this morning he had posted a photograph of himself in a cockpit with a woman I could not identify, and the caption had said, ’New hobby,’ like it was nothing. Like posting evidence of himself with another woman while his wife was sitting in his house was a perfectly ordinary Saturday.

I was done being patient.

I was done being the woman who waited in the armchair and fell asleep at two in the morning and woke up to find nothing had changed except that another day had passed and Julian Windsor still looked through her like she was not there.

I called my mother.

Mama answered on the second ring. She always answered on the second ring.

“I need you to do something,” I said.

“Good morning to you too,” Mama said.

“Mother,” I said.

A pause. She heard it in my voice—the particular register that meant this was not a social call.

“What do you need?” she said.

“I need you to call Grandma Celeste,” I said. “I need a meeting. All of us—me, Julian, his grandmother, you, whoever needs to be in the room.” I paused. “Julian did not come home last night. He did not come home, and the next morning he had posted a photograph on social media with a woman who is not me. I am his wife, Mother. I live in that house, and he is posting photographs with other women, and I am sitting here being told to be patient and wait, and it’s done. I am done waiting p>

Mama was quiet for a moment.

“You want me to call Grandma Celeste Windsor,” she said carefully.

“Yes,” I said. “She needs to know what her grandson is doing. She needs to know that he did not come home. She needs to know that he is publicly disrespecting this marriage and that I am not going to sit in that house and pretend it is not happening p>

“Delia p>

“Mother,” I said. “Call her today. Tell her I need a family meeting and I need Julian there and I need it to happen before I lose what is left of my patience p>

Another pause.

“All right,” Mama said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Delia.” Her voice shifted to the careful one. “Be calm when this meeting happens. Do not go in there with the fury you have right now because fury gives things away that patience keeps hidden p>

“I know,” I said.

“Do you p>

“Mother,” I said. “Call her p>

I hung up.

I sat in my wing of the Windsor estate in the particular silence of a Sunday afternoon and looked at the cracked screen of my phone and the photograph of a cockpit and a woman who flew Julian’s jet as if she had been doing it her whole life.

He thought he could keep all of this moving — the arrangement, the secrecy, the women, the house with its separate wings and its separate lives — indefinitely. He thought patience was infinite. He thought that if he moved carefully enough and kept enough layers between himself and the consequences, nothing would ever catch up to him.

He had underestimated Mama Kensington.

And he had underestimated me.

Mama was the woman who had arranged my entire life with the quiet precision of someone who believed every situation had a correct move and the job was simply to find it. She had navigated the Kensington family through decades of social positioning and difficult decisions, and she had never once lost a fight she had decided to take seriously.

She was going to take this one seriously. I looked at the photograph one more time.

The woman in the left seat. The sky. The caption.

New hobby.

I put the phone face down on the bed.

“Let’s see,” I said quietly to the empty room, “how you come out of this one, Julian p>

If you find any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.