Chapter 313

[ 907 words ]

Delia’s POV

“I am the one who told Julian to marry you, Delia. I will not pretend otherwise. When it became clear Katia belonged to another man, I told my grandson that a Windsor needed a wife who understood what this family required, and I believed you could be that woman. I have watched this marriage from a distance because I believed it was a good match, one I had a hand in making, and I have never once imagined it was anything less than a real marriage between the two of you. So you will need to help me understand something, because what you are describing does not match what I thought I built p>

“He is humiliating me,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she said.

“There is no perhaps about it p>

Grandma Celeste looked at me for a long moment, and something in her expression shifted, sharpened slightly, the way it did when she was about to say something she had clearly been holding back for some time.

“If Julian is not touching you,” she said, “is there something else you are not telling me? Or are you selling me a story that paints you as a victim because you know that story is the one I am most likely to feel sorry for p>

I stared at her.

“I know my grandson,” she continued. “I have known him since he was a small boy who cried when his mother left and never cried again after that, not once, not even at his own father’s funeral. He is not a cruel man, Delia. He is a careful one. There is a difference, even if it does not feel like one to you p>

“You think I am lying,” I said.

“I think,” Grandma Celeste said, “that you came into this house two years ago with a great deal of certainty about how this arrangement was going to end, and I think reality has not cooperated with that certainty, and I think it is far easier for you to call yourself a victim of his cruelty than to sit with the much harder truth that he simply does not want you the way you want him p>

The words landed somewhere deep in my chest, sharper than anything Julian had ever said to me directly, because Julian’s coldness I had learned to absorb. This was different. This came from someone who was supposed to be on my side.

“That is not fair,” I said.

“Fairness has very little to do with it,” she said. “I am not asking you to feel better about what I have said. I am asking you to consider whether the story you are telling me, and likely telling yourself, is the whole truth or only the part of it that lets you keep believing something that stopped being true a long time ago.” She picked her book back up, a clear signal that the conversation, as far as she was concerned, had reached its natural end. “Go home, Delia. Clean up whatever you broke. And think very carefully about what you actually want, rather than what you believe you are owed p>

I sat there for another moment, the porcelain still scattered across my own sitting room floor miles away, the photograph still burning behind my eyes every time I blinked, and found that I had no answer for her that I was willing to say out loud.

I stood up.

I left without saying goodbye.

The drive back to the city gave me too much time to sit with what she had said, the words replaying in a loop I could not turn off no matter how loudly I played the radio or how hard I gripped the steering wheel. I had walked into that room certain of my own story, certain that I was the wronged party in an arrangement that had never once functioned the way I had let myself believe it would, and I had walked out of it with that certainty cracked down the middle in a way I did not know how to repair.

I thought about the photograph again. The sandbank. The candles. The careful, deliberate way Julian had framed the shot so that whoever sat across from him remained invisible, protected, and kept entirely out of the public record while everything else about the moment was laid bare for the world to see.

He had never once protected me that way. Not in two years. Not in a single photograph, a single gesture, a single moment where he had gone out of his way to keep something about me safe from prying eyes.

That was the part Grandma Celeste had not said out loud, the part I suspected she understood perfectly well and had chosen to let me arrive at on my own. It was not simply that he did not want me. It was that he had never wanted to protect anything about me at all, and somewhere in that house tonight, on an island I could not name, there was a woman he clearly did.

I reached my own front door and let myself inside, stepping over the shattered porcelain still scattered across the floor of my sitting room exactly where I had left it.

I did not clean it up.

I left it there, a small monument to the version of myself that had believed, right up until this evening, that patience alone would eventually be enough.

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