Chapter 343

[ 1,013 words ]

Katia’s POV

The tear on my cheek dried, but more were coming. I did not wipe them away. I let them fall while I tried to make sense of everything.

Sam stayed quiet. She knew me well enough to give me time.

I turned back to her after a few minutes.

“He has been lying to me since,” I said. “He has been lying to me every single day since then p>

Sam nodded.

“Yes p>

I walked back to my desk and picked up the marriage certificate again. My name. His name. Seven years.

I was married to Julian Windsor. And he had known it the entire time.

I didn’t call ahead.

Calling ahead gave people time to prepare their faces, time to decide which version of the truth they were going to offer before you’d even walked through the door, and I had spent enough of my life sitting across from people who had prepared their faces. I was done being polite about it.

The Windsor mansion sat at the end of a long private driveway that I had driven up more times in the past two years than I could count, and every single time I had believed I was coming as a guest. A welcome visitor. A friend of the family who had somehow, graciously, been allowed a seat at a table that had nothing to do with her.

I parked and sat in the car for exactly one minute, long enough to decide I wasn’t going to cry before I got inside, and then I got out.

Grandma Celeste opened the door herself, which told me someone had seen the car coming up the drive and thought better of sending staff to intercept it. Her face did something complicated the moment she saw mine, something that tried to be warm and welcoming and couldn’t quite get there, like a woman reaching for a mask she’d already worn too many times and finding it didn’t fit the same way anymore.

“Katia,” she said.

“I need to speak to you,” I said. “Both of you. Is Gail here p>

Grandma Celeste stepped back from the door without answering, which was answer enough.

They were sitting in the front room when I walked in, Grandma in the armchair she always occupied near the window, Gail on the settee with a cup of tea she had clearly not been drinking, both of them carrying the stillness of two women who had been waiting for exactly this visit without being entirely sure when it would arrive.

I didn’t sit down.

I stood in the middle of the room and looked at both of them, two women I had trusted without question, and asked the only thing I’d driven all the way here to ask.

“How long have you known I was his wife p>

Neither of them spoke. Grandma Celeste’s eyes moved to Gail’s and stayed there, and Gail looked down at the cup in her hands, and the silence stretched long enough to confirm everything I’d already suspected before I’d even opened my mouth.

“How long?” I said again, harder this time.

Still nothing.

I let the silence run another few seconds. Then I looked at Celeste.

“He threatened you, didn’t he p>

Grandma Celeste’s chin lifted slightly, a woman bracing for something she had been bracing for privately for longer than she wanted to admit.

“Sit down, Katia p>

“I’d rather stand p>

She held my gaze a moment, then nodded once, like she’d decided something.

“I had my suspicions the first time I met Aiden,” she said. “The boy looks like his father in ways you don’t notice until you are looking for them. But suspicions aren’t proof, and I told myself I was reading into things because I wanted it to be true.” She paused, her hands folding in her lap. “Then you came here that time when I invited you for lunch; I asked you to tell me about your husband over tea. And you described the ring p>

“The ring,” I repeated.

“That ring has been in this family for four generations,” Grandma Celeste said, and her voice was even, but something underneath it was not. “I wore it myself before I placed it in Julian’s hands and told him that one day he would give it to his wife. There is no other ring like it in the world. The moment you described it, sitting right there in this house, not knowing what it was or where it came from, only that a stranger had put it on your hand seven years ago, I knew p>

“You knew,” I said. “You sat across from me in this room and you knew, and you said nothing p>

“I wasn’t certain enough yet,” she said. “I kept telling myself I needed to be sure before I turned your life upside down. And then the magazine ran the picture p>

“The article,” I said.

“You were photographed wearing it. Julian saw it before I did. He came back here that same night.” She stopped. “I had never seen him like that before. Not even when he was a boy p>

“Like what?” I said. “Angry p>

“Like a man who had realized something that had cost him more than he could calculate in a single evening,” Grandma Celeste said. “He said you had stolen years from him. That if you had worn the ring from the beginning, there would have been no Delia, no arrangement, and no years lost pretending a marriage he was already in didn’t exist. He said if you had simply worn it, everything would have been different.” She looked at me directly now. “He said he would never forgive you for it p>

The words landed exactly the way she meant them to, not cruelly, just plainly, which was somehow worse.

“And you let him carry that,” I said. “You knew the truth, and you said nothing to me. Did he ask you not to? Did he sit in this room and tell you to stay quiet p>

The pause before she answered was its own confession.

“Yes,” she said.

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