Chapter 349

[ 1,211 words ]

Julian’s POV

“You don’t talk business?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. “Zane, she works for my wife, the woman who just threw me out. How can you not talk business? Do you have any idea what she could be doing right now? She could be feeding Katia every single thing we have ever discussed in the office. She could be the reason Katia knew exactly when to show up at that house p>

Zane didn’t even flinch. He just kept looking at the ceiling, looking like he was thinking about his breakfast rather than the collapse of an empire. “You’re paranoid, Julian. You think everyone is out to get you because you’ve spent two years lying to your wife. It’s a simple case of cause and effect. Maybe she didn’t tell her anything. Maybe Katia is just smarter than you. Did that ever cross your mind? Maybe you don’t need a mole to figure out you’re a fool p>

“I am not a fool,” I growled, standing up and walking over to the window. The city looked vast, uncaring, and completely out of my hands. “I am a man who made a series of bad choices based on the fear that I would lose the only thing that ever mattered to me. And now, I have to deal with the fallout p>

“Well, deal with it somewhere else,” Zane said, standing up and pointing toward the door. “Like I said, Sam is coming over in the morning. And frankly, having the CEO of the Windsor Empire Group sobbing on my couch over a woman who clearly has more backbone than he does is not the vibe I’m going for. Go get a hotel room. Find a bar. Call your lawyers. Do something productive p>

I turned to look at him, seeing the hardened expression he wore whenever he decided the conversation was over. He was right, of course. Staying here would only make things worse, especially if Sam was involved. If she walked in and saw me, it would confirm every suspicion she might have about our loyalties. I grabbed my keys, the metal biting into my palm, and headed for the door.

“Fine,” I said, pausing at the threshold. “But if I find out you’ve been feeding her information, there won’t be a place in this city for you to hide p>

Zane laughed, a dry sound that had no warmth in it. “Go get some sleep, Julian. You’re going to need it if you want to win her back. And believe me, you’re going to have to work harder than you ever have in your life if you want to get back into that house p>

Delia’s POV

The taxi stopped outside my parents’ house at four minutes past midnight, and I sat in the back seat staring at the lit windows of the front room like a woman who had run out of every other option and arrived here last, which was exactly what I was.

I had nothing with me.

Not a bag, not a change of clothes, not even my phone charger, because I hadn’t been given the time to pack any of it. Katia had told us both to leave, standing in the middle of that house like she owned it, like two years of my life in those rooms meant absolutely nothing, and Julian had looked at her and then looked at me and then picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and walked out the front door without a single word. No argument. No fight. Not even a backwards glance in my direction.

He just left.

And I had stood there watching the door close behind him, and something in me refused to accept it, refused to pick up my things and follow him out like a woman who had already decided she had lost, because I hadn’t lost; this was my house, I lived here, and I had a right to be standing in that hallway, and I told Katia exactly that. I told her she had no authority here. I told her Julian would hear about this. I told her she could not walk into someone else’s home and simply decide who stayed and who didn’t.

Katia had listened to all of it without saying a single word back. And then she called security.

Two men in uniforms appeared from somewhere, and their hands were not rough but not gentle either, just professional and efficient, and then I was outside and the door was closing and I was standing on the front step of a house I had called mine for two years with nothing in my hands and nowhere to go.

I paid the driver with the card I had in my jacket pocket and got out and stood on the pavement outside my parents’ house at midnight in whatever I had thrown on that morning, because that was the only thing I had. My jacket and my phone, which had twelve percent battery and no charger. That was the sum total of everything I had managed to keep hold of while two security guards walked me out of my own life.

I rang the bell.

The front room light stayed on. I heard the television drop in volume, then footsteps, and then my father opened the door, and the look on his face when he saw me standing there was the look of a man who had been hoping for a quiet evening and understood immediately that he was not going to get one.

“Delia,” he said.

I walked past him into the house without saying anything, because if I opened my mouth before I was sitting down, I was going to fall apart in the doorway, and I refused to do that on a pavement.

Martha was on the sofa, still in her dressing gown, a cup of something warm in her hands, the television running low in the corner. She looked up when I came in, and her face went through three expressions in the space of a second, surprise, confusion, and then something that settled into alarm as she took in the full picture of what had walked through her front room door at midnight.

“Delia,” she said, differently from the way my father had said it, softer and more careful. What on earth. What has happened to you p>

I sat down on the sofa beside her and started crying.

I hadn’t meant to. I had spent the entire taxi ride here telling myself I was done crying, that I had cried enough for one night and what I needed now was to think clearly and make a plan, and then I sat down beside my mother on the sofa where I had sat a thousand times since I was small and something in me simply gave way entirely.

Martha set her cup down and put both arms around me without saying anything, the way she had when I was seven and had fallen off my bicycle; the way she had when I was seventeen and a boy had broken my heart for the first time; the way only a mother could hold a person who had come apart in a way they didn’t entirely understand yet.

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