Chapter 400

[ 982 words ]

Delia’s POV

“In a moment,” she said. “I want you to understand something first, because I suspect nobody else in your life has had the honesty to say it to you plainly. You are not a victim in this story, Delia, whatever narrative you have been telling yourself since the truth came out. You knew, from the very first day, that the marriage was not real. You knew Julian would never love you, never touch you, never see you as anything more than a convenient arrangement. You chose to let the world believe otherwise anyway, because the alternative, admitting the truth to yourself, felt worse than living the lie p>

The words landed exactly where she intended them to land, sharp and merciless, and I hated how much of what she said matched the same conclusion I had already reached alone in my apartment days earlier.

“You do not know me,” I said, though my voice had lost some of its earlier conviction.

“I know enough,” Tessa said again. “I know a woman who built her entire identity around a borrowed name, and I know what happens to women like that once the name gets taken away. There is nothing left underneath it. No face. No story of your own. Just an empty space where a person used to be, before she decided a title mattered more than actually building something real p>

I stood up from the table, my chair scraping loudly against the floor, several nearby diners glancing over at the sound.

“I am not staying for this,” I said.

“You never do,” Tessa said, unbothered, already reaching for the menu as though she intended to order for herself now that I was leaving. “That has always been your problem, Delia. Running from the truth the moment someone finally says it out loud p>

I left cash on the table for a meal I had barely eaten and walked out of the restaurant without looking back, Tessa’s voice trailing behind me, calm and merciless, exactly the kind of parting shot a woman like her would deliver without a single flicker of guilt.

Outside, the cold air hit me hard enough that I had to stop walking for a moment, my hands braced against the brick wall of the building, forcing air into my lungs that felt suddenly too thin to hold.

She was wrong about some of it.

But she was not wrong about all of it, and that was the part I could not shake as I finally made myself walk toward my car, replaying every word until they blurred together into something I suspected I would be hearing in my head for a very long time.

I sat in the driver’s seat for a long time without starting the engine, staring at nothing through the windshield, the cold slowly seeping through the glass around me. My hands were still shaking, whether from the confrontation itself or the cold or some combination of both I could no longer clearly separate.

I thought about the first time I had ever actually met Julian, not the version of him I had built in my head from years of hearing his name at family gatherings and seeing his face in the business pages, but the real man, sitting across from me in a booth at The Velvet Ember, the car he had sent for me still idling somewhere outside. I had gone into that meeting expecting something entirely different from what I received, and I had watched him lay out the terms of our arrangement with the same easy authority he apparently carried into every room he ever walked into and had decided, with the certainty only a very young woman could manage, that a man like that was worth building an entire future around, even knowing, from that very first conversation, exactly how little of a future he was actually offering me.

I had spent years chasing that certainty long after any reasonable person would have let it go.

Tessa had called it a title, and she was not entirely wrong about that either. Somewhere along the way, the fantasy I had built around Julian had stopped being about him at all and had become something else entirely, a story about who I wanted to be, the woman important enough to stand beside a man like that, the woman other people envied rather than overlooked. I had married an idea, not a person, and the idea had turned out to be exactly as hollow as everyone had apparently seen from the very beginning except me.

My phone buzzed in my bag, another notification, another headline circulating with my name attached to a story I no longer had any control over. I did not check it. I simply sat there in the quiet of the car, letting the silence settle around me instead, trying to remember the last time I had made a decision in my life that had not been built around what Julian Windsor thought of me, wanted from me, or represented to everyone watching from the outside.

I could not remember one.

That realization frightened me more than anything Tessa Sterling had said across that table, more than the headlines, more than the public humiliation still unfolding across every screen in the city. I had built two years of my life, and perhaps longer than that if I were honest with myself, around a man who had never once asked me to build anything at all.

I finally started the car and pulled out of the lot, driving without any real destination, simply needing the motion, the illusion of moving forward even if I had no clear idea yet what forward was actually supposed to look like for a woman who had just watched the only identity she had built for herself get stripped away in public, one headline at a time.

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