Chapter 300

[ 995 words ]

Julian’s POV

I had been driving for forty minutes through traffic that should have taken fifteen, and the only thing keeping my temper level was the thought of getting home, taking off this suit, and not speaking to another human being for at least an hour.

That plan ended the moment I walked through my own front door.

Delia was standing at the entrance of the gallery, waiting. Fully dressed this time, holding a glass of red wine out toward me with both hands like an offering.

I stopped walking.

I looked at her and then looked at the wine.

I had not forgotten what happened the last time she handed me a glass in this house. My knuckles still remembered the way my legs had stopped working halfway up these stairs, the way the room had tilted, the cold certainty that something had been put in the drink before I ever raised it to my mouth.

I took the glass anyway, because refusing it would have started a conversation I did not want to have, and I held it without drinking from it.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, her voice bright in a way that made me immediately suspicious of everything that was about to come out of her mouth, “I just got an interesting call from Mama p>

I stared at her and waited.

“She invited us to dinner this coming weekend,” Delia said.

“And how is that interesting?” I said.

She blinked, as though the answer should have been obvious to anyone standing in the room. “Because we are invited p>

“We are invited to things constantly, Delia,” I said. “Galas. Fundraisers. Charity boards that want my name on a letterhead so they can print it in a program nobody reads. None of it interests me. Why would your mother’s dinner table be any different p>

“Because it is family,” she said.

“It is not my family,” I said.

She flinched at that, just slightly, and recovered fast enough that most people would have missed it. I did not miss it. I had spent two years watching her recover from things quickly, building a face that could absorb almost anything I said and turn it into something she could survive.

“It could be,” she said. “If you let it p>

“I am not in the business of letting things become what they are not,” I said.

“You make it sound like a corporate decision p>

“Most decisions are,” I said. “The ones that matter, anyway p>

I walked past her without responding further, crossed to the side table near the staircase, and set the untouched wine down on the marble surface. I heard her shift behind me, the soft sound of her heels turning against the floor as she watched me decide not to drink it.

“I am not going,” I said, and started toward the stairs.

“You never go anywhere I ask you to,” Delia said. Her voice had dropped, losing some of the brightness it carried a moment ago. “You go everywhere business takes you and nowhere I take you. I have asked you to dinner four times this year, Julian. Four times. And every single time you had somewhere more important to be p>

“That is correct,” I said, without turning around.

“Do you hate me that much p>

I stopped on the third step.

I turned around slowly and looked down at her standing in the gallery with the wine still sitting untouched on the table between us, her face arranged into something that wanted to look hurt and almost managed it.

“I do not hate you,” I said. “Hate would require me to feel something toward you, Delia. What you are describing is indifference, and indifference is not an insult. It is simply what happens when an arrangement is exactly what it was always going to be, no more and no less p>

“That is worse,” she said quietly. “Hate would at least mean you noticed me p>

“Then stop asking me to attend dinners,” I said, “and start accepting what this actually is. I told you the terms before you moved into this house. Nothing about them has changed p>

“Everything about them has changed,” she said. “I have lived here for two years. I have sat across from you at breakfast. You think none of that changes anything p>

“It does not change the terms,” I said.

I continued up the stairs, done with the conversation, done with the wine on the table and the way she was standing there waiting for something I had no intention of giving her tonight or any other night.

“Well,” Delia said behind me, and something shifted in her tone, something sharper and more deliberate than the hurt that had been there a moment ago. I stopped with one hand already on the banister. “Jude Wolfe is invited too p>

I turned around.

The name landed in the quiet of the gallery and changed everything about how I was thinking about the next several days.

“Oh,” I said. “I’ll be there p>

I climbed the stairs without another word, leaving her standing there with the wine and whatever satisfaction she thought she had just earned.

I reached the top of the staircase and walked down the corridor to my study, closing the door behind me before I let any of what I was actually feeling show on my face.

I sat at my desk without turning on the lamp.

Jude Wolfe sitting at Martha Kensington’s table, across from Katia, in front of her entire family, with his jaw mostly healed and his understanding of the situation still dangerously incomplete, was not something I was willing to leave unattended. He had signed the document in that warehouse. He had relinquished any claim to Aiden in writing.

But a signature taken under duress did not change what a man wanted; it only changed what he was willing to put on paper in the moment he believed his hand might not survive the alternative.

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