Chapter 423

[ 1,246 words ]

Noah’s POV

Meeting Grandma Celeste had left me with more questions than answers, and there was only one person close enough to the Windsor family to help me find them.

My wife.

I called Delia the next morning and told her I wanted to make dinner, an invitation to my villa that I dressed up as something simple, a husband wanting to spend an evening with the woman he had married, when in truth I needed information only she could give me and had no intention yet of explaining why.

She arrived a little after seven, and I met her at the door myself. I kept no staff in the house beyond a woman who came three times a week to clean, preferring the quiet of an empty villa to the constant presence of people paid to notice everything I did.

“This is beautiful,” Delia said, looking around the entryway, the clean lines and quiet luxury of a house that had never once needed to announce its own wealth.

“Thank you,” I said, pulling out a chair for her at the table I had set myself. “Sit. I hope you like what I made p>

We ate slowly, the conversation easier than I expected it to be, and somewhere between the first course and the second I found myself genuinely curious about the woman sitting across from me rather than simply extracting the information I actually needed.

“Tell me about yourself,” I said. “Not the version the headlines wrote. The real one p>

Delia studied me for a moment, as though deciding whether the question was safe to answer honestly.

“I have been obsessed with Julian Windsor for a very long time,” she said finally. “Longer than I probably should admit to my own husband. When Katia turned up pregnant, I understood that was my opening, my chance to marry into a family I had wanted to belong to since before I fully understood what wanting something like that actually meant p>

I did not flinch at the honesty. I appreciated it more than I expected to.

“Do you still want him?” I asked. “Even now p>

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation, without apology, meeting my eyes directly as she said it. “Julian is loyal. He does not cheat. Whatever else is true about him, he tells you the truth and lets you decide what to do with it. That kind of honesty is rare, and I have never stopped wanting it directed at me instead of at someone else p>

I nodded slowly, filing the answer away without comment.

“And Grandma Celeste,” I said. “You knew her when you were still part of that family. What is she like p>

“Kind,” Delia said. “Genuinely kind, which is rarer than people assume in families like that. But she is not a pushover. Every woman in this city who has ever crossed her has learned to fear her a little, because she is powerful in ways that do not require raising her voice p>

“What kind of grandmother is she?” I asked. “To her actual grandchildren, Julian and Gail p>

Delia considered the question longer than the others.

“Protective,” she said. “Fiercely protective when it comes to her own family. I do not think there is much she would not do to shield them, even things that might not look like protection from the outside p>

I sat with that answer, turning it over quietly, thinking about the photographs Grandma Celeste had shown me, my father’s easy, youthful grin, a version of him I had never once witnessed myself. I did not tell Delia any of it. I did not tell her I had gone to the estate at all, that I had spent an entire afternoon with a woman she clearly still respected despite everything that had happened between our two families.

Some things, I decided, were still mine to hold quietly for now.

We finished dinner talking about smaller things after that, and by the time we cleared the table, the hour had grown late enough that sending her home did not feel practical.

“Stay,” I said. “There is a guest room made up. It is too late to be driving across the city alone p>

Delia hesitated only briefly before nodding, and I showed her to the room myself, offering nothing more than a polite goodnight before retreating to my own study, the questions from earlier in the evening still turning quietly in my mind.

I had learned what I needed to learn about Grandma Celeste.

I had also learned, without quite meaning to, considerably more about the woman I had married than I had expected to discover over a single dinner.

I sat at my desk for a long while after retiring to the study, the questions from earlier still turning quietly through my mind alongside a new one I had not expected to arrive at all. I had married Delia because my father arranged it, a transaction dressed up as a wedding, the kind of union built entirely around usefulness rather than affection. I had never once imagined I would sit across a dinner table from her and find myself genuinely curious about the shape of her ownlife beyond what she could offer me.

She had answered every question honestly, even the ones that clearly cost her something to answer, and there had been a kind of dignity in that honesty I had not expected from a woman the tabloids had spent weeks reducing to a punchline.

I thought about her answer regarding Julian, the calm certainty in her voice when she said she still wanted him, and the complete absence of shame in admitting it out loud to the man she was legally bound to instead. Most people, I suspected, would have lied and would have offered some careful, diplomatic version of the truth designed to spare my feelings. Delia had simply told me the truth and let me decide what to do with it, the same quality she had praised in Julian only moments earlier, apparently without recognizing the irony of it.

I wondered whether she understood how rare that kind of honesty actually was, or whether she had spent so many years surrounded by people performing sincerity that she no longer recognized the real thing when it lived inside her ownchest.

My phone sat on the desk in front of me, the temptation to call Grandma Celeste again already forming somewhere in the back of my mind, a dozen new questions gathering that I was not yet ready to ask her directly. I wanted to know more about the brothers in that photograph, about the silence that had swallowed an entire branch of my family before I was even born, about whether the warmth I had witnessed in her sitting room had ever once been extended to my father before something broke it beyond repair.

I did not call her that night.

Instead I sat there in the quiet of my study, listening to the faint sounds of the house settling around me, and found myself thinking, unexpectedly, about the woman asleep down the hall in my guest room, a wife I had married for reasons that had nothing to do with wanting to know her, who had somehow, over the course of a single dinner, become someone I found myself curious about anyway.

I did not know what to do with that realization.

For tonight, I decided I did not need to do anything with it at all.

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