Chapter 345

[ 999 words ]

Kata’s POV

“When were they opened?” I said.

“The oldest one,” she said, “was opened 7 years ago under the name Kat p>

“Why?” I said, and the word came out raw in a way I hadn’t intended. “If he was angry enough to keep me from knowing the truth, angry enough to ask everyone in this house to stay quiet and threaten to take Aiden away if they didn’t, why would he put everything under both our names? Why would he spend years making sure I was taken care of financially without ever telling me he was doing it? It doesn’t make sense. It contradicts everything else he did p>

Grandma Celeste looked at me for a long moment without speaking, and I recognized the look. It was the look of a woman choosing her words the way you chose footing on uneven ground, carefully, one step at a time.

“Because he loves you, Katia,” she said finally. “In his own way. In the only way he seems to know how. But it is love. A man who wanted to punish you would have hidden things, taken precautions, and protected himself first the way men like Julian usually do. He didn’t. He hid nothing from you financially. He has been making sure that if anything ever happened to him, or to this family, or to any of it, you would never be left without ground to stand on.” She paused. “He has been taking care of you since before you ever knew he was your husband. And he has never once asked you to notice or to thank him for it p>

I stood there in the middle of the front room with that sitting in my chest next to everything else, the anger, the betrayal, the memory of Aiden asking to come home with me and always being told it wasn’t the right time, and I tried to find a way to hold all of it at once without one piece of it canceling out another.

I couldn’t.

“He should have told me,” I said. “All of it. The marriage. Aiden. The accounts, the properties, all of it. He should have told me instead of managing me from a distance like I was something to be handled p>

“Yes,” Grandma Celeste said. “He should have p>

“Loving someone doesn’t give you the right to make their decisions for them p>

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t p>

“And it doesn’t excuse what he did with Aiden. Nothing excuses that p>

“No,” she said again, and she didn’t try to argue it or soften it or find the clause that would make it easier to swallow. She just agreed, quietly, the way a woman agreed when she had already made peace with the fact that the person she loved had done something she could not entirely defend.

I looked at Gail one last time, still on the settee, still watching me with her hands folded tight in her lap and her eyes carrying two years of a secret she should have told me the first week she knew.

She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something else, something beyond the apology she had already given that I didn’t have the capacity to receive yet, and I watched her close it again because some things couldn’t be fixed in a single afternoon, and she was smart enough to know that too.

I looked at Grandma Celeste, sitting in her armchair by the window, older than any of this nonsense deserved, carrying more of Julian’s weight than any woman her age should have had to carry. She had known the truth, sat across from me at this table more times than I could count, watched me play at being a family friend while she held the real answer in her hands, and some part of me wanted to be angrier at her than I was.

But she was also the woman who had given her grandson a ring and told him one day he would know who it belonged to, and whatever Julian had done with that instruction, however badly he had handled every single thing that came after it, she had started it from a place I could not entirely fault.

“Thank you,” I said. “For telling me p>

I picked up my bag and walked out without waiting for either of them to say anything back, back down the long hallway and out through the front door into the afternoon, and I sat in my car at the end of the driveway for a long time before I started the engine, staring at the house in my rearview mirror, thinking about a man who had put my name on everything he owned and still hadn’t found a way to say it out loud.

I sat in the car for longer than I meant to.

The engine was off, the driveway stretching out in front of me, the Windsor mansion sitting in the rearview mirror like a question I had just spent the last hour answering, and I stared at the steering wheel and let everything Grandma Celeste had told me rearrange itself inside my chest into something I could actually use.

Twenty-five percent of Windsor Empire Group.

Every property. Every deed. Both names.

A savings account opened seven years ago under the name Kat.

I thought about the version of Julian I had constructed in my head over the past two years, the cold, unknowable man who kept everyone at arm’s length and gave nothing away, who had looked at me across rooms and said less than he meant and more than he admitted, and I tried to square that version against a man who had been quietly putting my name on everything he owned since before I even knew his.

I couldn’t square it. The two versions of him refused to sit in the same room without fighting each other, and I was tired of trying to make them cooperate.

I thought about the penthouse.

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.