Chapter 102

[ 864 words ]

Delia’s POV

“Mother.” My voice was very quiet. “He told me tonight that I am nothing to him but a pretence wife.” I held her gaze. “Those were his exact words. Nothing to him but a pretence wife p>

Martha blinked. Something moved across her face that was not quite guilt and not quite shame and was adjacent to both. She picked up her tea.

“Men say things,” she said.

“Not Julian.” I set my cup down. “Julian says exactly what he means. Always. It is one of the only things I know for certain about him.” I looked at my mother. “He meant it p>

The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Outside a car passed on the road. The house settled.

“Then what do you want me to say?” Mama asked. Her voice had shifted slightly — less the strategic advisor, more the mother, which happened rarely enough that I noticed it when it did.

“I want you to tell me the truth,” I said. “About Katia. About why Julian looks at her the way he does. About why my own husband treats my sister like she is the oxygen in every room and treats me like I am the furniture.” I looked at her steadily. “Because you know something, Mother. You have always known something. I can see it every time her name comes up p>

Mama put her cup down.

She was quiet for a longer moment than I expected. Mama was not a woman who took long pauses — she moved quickly, pivoted cleanly, and had an answer for everything. The pause told me more than anything she had said.

“Your sister,” she said finally, “is a complicated subject p>

“She’s going to Dubai,” I said. “With my husband. And when they are in the same city at the same time, he stops pretending I exist entirely.” I said it and waited for a bit, jealousy written all over my face. “I need to understand why p>

Mama looked at her hands. At the table. At a point somewhere between the two. “Julian agreed to marry you,” she said. “That was a business decision. What happens — how he feels about things — that was never part of what we arranged p>

“I know that p>

“Then what do you want, Delia? Truly p>

I thought about it. Sitting in my mother’s kitchen at midnight, with Julian’s words still sitting in my chest like something cold and heavy, I thought about what I actually wanted.

Not Julian’s love. I had understood months ago that it was never going to exist. Not his warmth or his attention or the specific way he looked at Katia — I understood that was not transferable, that you could not redirect it by trying harder or wearing a different dress or being better at events.

What I wanted was simpler and more complicated than any of that.

I wanted to matter.

I wanted to not be nothing.

I wanted the one thing Julian had made very clear tonight I was never going to get from him.

“I want options,” I said.

Mama looked at me. Something shifted in her expression — the mother receding, the strategist returning. She recognised the word. Options were her language.

“What kind of options?” she said.

“The kind that don’t depend on Julian Windsor deciding to be a different person.” I picked up my tea. “The kind I make for myself p>

My mother looked at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, she nodded.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s think p>

We sat in the kitchen until two in the morning. We drank three cups of tea each. Mama talked and I listened, and occasionally I redirected, and by the time I drove back through the dark city toward the Windsor estate, I had not found what I was looking for.

But I had found the beginning of it.

Which was, I was learning, how all the important things started.

The estate was dark when I returned. Julian’s study light was still on — a thin line of gold under the door at the end of the west corridor. He was still working. Or sitting with whatever he was thinking about that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with Dubai.

I walked past the study without stopping.

I went to my room.

I sat on the edge of my bed, and I thought about options. About making them for myself. About the specific, cold freedom of a woman who had stopped waiting for someone else to decide what she was worth and had started deciding it herself.

Then I thought about Catwoman.

About the fifteen women who had claimed to be her. About the legal entity and the spokesperson and the three precise sentences that had made the racing world hold its breath. About Julian’s obsession — the way it lit him up in a way nothing else did, the way the Catwoman search was the one thing that made him fully, completely alive in a way that had nothing to do with business.

I thought about that for a long time.

Then I got into bed.

I did not sleep immediately.

I was thinking.

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