Chapter 227

[ 927 words ]

Delia’s POV

Someone had built that wall.

Someone with the kind of resources that made walls like that possible.

I put the phone down on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

I had run out of options from the outside. Every professional avenue had produced the same result — nothing. Whatever Katia was hiding, she had buried it so deep and so carefully that eight months of professional investigation had not produced a single usable crack.

Which meant if I was going to find anything, it was going to have to come from the inside.

I needed someone who was close to her.

Someone who knew things.

Someone who would not realize they were telling me something useful.

I picked up my bag and my keys.

The Windsor family mansion was forty minutes from Julian’s house.

I had been there enough times to know the gate code and the layout and where Grandma Celeste preferred to spend her mornings. I pulled up at eleven, and a member of staff let me in without question—I was still technically Mrs. Windsor as far as this household was concerned, and nobody had told them otherwise.

I found Aiden in the garden.

He was sitting at the table near the rose beds with his notepad, working on something with the focused, unhurried attention he brought to everything. Grandma was not with him. Gail was not with him. He was alone in the way he was sometimes alone, which was completely self-contained and not lonely at all.

He looked up when I came through the garden door. He looked at me with the clear, assessing eyes that I was beginning to find unsettling in a six-year-old. Then he looked back at his notepad.

“Hi, Aiden,” I said.

He did not answer immediately. He finished the line he was writing. Then he looked up.

“Hi,” he said. The tone of someone who was answering because manners required it and not because they were particularly pleased to.

I sat down across from him.

“I was thinking,” I said. Warm voice. Aunt’s voice. The voice I had prepared on the way down the stairs. “I would like to take you out today. Somewhere fun. Whatever you want to do p>

Aiden looked at me.

He had an expression I could not fully read—not suspicious exactly, not unfriendly exactly. The expression of someone who was looking at a situation and had already formed an opinion about it but was giving it one more second before confirming.

I could tell, from the way he looked at me, that whatever he was about to say I was not going to like.

“I don’t go out with people who fight my mum,” he said.

I blinked.

“Aiden,” I said carefully. “I am your aunt. Your mum is my sister. Sisters fight sometimes. That is just what happens in families p>

“You fight her at every dinner,” Aiden said. He was not being unkind. He was reporting a fact with the precision he brought to all facts. “Every single one. Why is that p>

I opened my mouth.

He was not finished.

“Are you jealous of my mum?” he asked.

The question landed in the garden and sat there.

I felt the heat rise in my face. I swallowed it down. I was not going to lose my composure to a six-year-old in a garden. I was a Kensington. I was composed.

“Of course not,” I said. “I am your aunt, and I wanted to spend some time with you. That is all p>

“Why now?” Aiden said.

“What p>

“Why now?” he said again. Patiently. The patience of someone who knew the question was reasonable and was prepared to wait for an answer that was also reasonable. “I have been back in this city with my mum for over a year. Your family has met me. You have all been at the same dinners. In all that time nobody from your family asked to spend time with me or take me anywhere or get to know me.” He tilted his head slightly. “Not once. And now you want to take me out.” He looked at me directly. “Aunt Delia. What do you actually want p>

I stared at him.

“I—” I started.

“Also,” he said, “when you came to the Windsor estate not long ago, you acted like it was the first time you were seeing me. Even though we had met before.” He picked up his pencil. “I notice things p>

“Aiden p>

“I don’t go out with pretenders,” he said. Simply. Finally. The tone of a judge delivering a verdict. “I’m sorry p>

He looked back at his notepad.

He picked up where he had left off.

I sat across from him for another moment. Waiting for him to look up again. He did not look up. He was writing something — numbers, letters, something I could not read from where I was sitting — and he was done with the conversation in the complete, unselfconscious way that children were done with things when they had said what they had to say.

I stood up.

I walked back into the house.

I stood in the corridor with my hand on the wall and breathed.

Six years old.

Six years old and he had sat across from me in a garden and told me he did not go out with pretenders with the calm certainty of someone twice his age and three times his experience, and he had gone back to his notepad before I had finished processing what he had said.

“Little brat,” I said.

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