Chapter 135

[ 930 words ]

Julian’s POV

I did not put food on Delia’s plate.

I noticed this approximately three seconds after it happened. I did not correct it.

I told myself it was an oversight. I knew it wasn’t.

The lunch continued. Gail was telling a story about Aiden and a science experiment that had apparently involved a controlled explosion and three singed eyebrows – Aiden’s, Gail’s, and a teddy bear’s – and the table was laughing. Katia was laughing, really laughing, the sudden unguarded version that arrived before she decided whether to let it.

I started a conversation with her. I did not plan to. I just asked what the experiment had been trying to prove, and she turned to me and explained it with the specific delight of someone who had found it genuinely impressive even while standing in a singed kitchen, and the conversation went from there — the experiment, Aiden’s methodology, and the fact that he had apparently sourced the chemicals from Gail’s bathroom cabinet with a precision that suggested prior research.

“He planned it,” I said.

“Obviously,” Katia said. “He always plans things p>

“Like his mother,” I said.

She looked at me. Something moved in her expression — not quite a smile, but the thing that happened before a smile when she had decided not to let it all the way out.

“Like his mother,” she agreed.

Grandma, across the table, was watching me watch her.

She said nothing. She simply picked up her wine and looked quietly satisfied.

At the far end of the table Delia sat with her food and her composure and her very still expression and said nothing at all.

She had tried to start a conversation with me twice during the lunch. Once about the Dubai 24 Hour Race coverage and once about a WEG board matter she had apparently read about somewhere. Both times I had answered in two words and turned back to the main conversation without meaning to. Without deciding to. It had simply happened the way things happened when your attention was somewhere else entirely and your body hadn’t caught up with the social obligation of redirecting it.

I knew I had done it.

I knew she had noticed.

I looked at Delia once during the meal — properly looked, directly — and she was watching me with an expression I had not seen from her before. Not hurt, not angry. Something colder than both of those. Something that had moved past the feeling stage and into the calculation stage.

I held her gaze for a moment.

Then Katia said something to Gail, and I looked back.

I could not help it.

I genuinely, completely, could not help it.

That was the most honest thing about all of it.

Delia’s POV

I sat at the far end of the table and watched my marriage end in real time.

Not legally. Not officially. Just the slow, excruciating process of understanding that the man you are contractually bound to has never once looked at you the way he looks at someone else, and that someone else is sitting three seats away, laughing at a story about a teddy bear with singed eyebrows.

Julian laughed too. Not the managed version he used at events. The real one. The one I had never once heard him produce in eight months of living in the same house.

I picked up my fork and put it down.

He had put food on her plate.

I had watched it happen. He had reached across without thinking about it — the lamb, because she had been looking at it — and placed it on her plate with the ease of someone who did that all the time. Who knew what she wanted before she said it. Who paid that kind of attention.

He had not put food on my plate.

He had not looked at my plate once.

I was his wife. I was sitting at his grandmother’s table at his family lunch, and he had not looked at my plate once because he was too busy watching my sister laugh at a story he was clearly finding as funny as she was, which told me everything about how many times they had laughed together when nobody was watching.

I drank my wine.

Across the table his grandmother was watching him watch Katia with the expression of someone watching exactly what they had engineered happen. She had put me at the far end of this table deliberately. She had invited my sister to this lunch without telling Julian until this morning. I had heard him on the phone at nine, the controlled tone of a man who had been surprised and was managing it. His grandmother had set this up. She had put Katia at the centre of her table and put me at the edge and was sitting there looking satisfied about it.

I was twenty-four years old, and I had been handled.

Gail finished her story. Katia was still laughing. Julian said something to her quietly — too quietly for me to hear from where I had been placed, and she looked at him and shook her head and said something back, and he smiled.

Not the public smile. The real one.

I had never seen Julian Windsor smile like that. In eight months of marriage I had never once seen that smile directed at anything in my vicinity.

I set my wine glass down.

“Katia.” My voice came out perfectly level. I was proud of that. “Could I speak to you for a moment? Privately 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.