Chapter 82

[ 1,261 words ]

Delia’s POV

I had been in the West Wing twice before, and both times Julian had been home.

This was the third time. He was in Tokyo. Three days, which his assistant had confirmed through the household calendar that Delia Kensington-Windsor was apparently permitted to view but not modify, a distinction that felt like its own kind of message. The estate was quiet in the way it only got when Julian was genuinely gone, not the tight, managed quiet of his presence behind a closed door but the looser, emptier quiet of a house that had stopped holding its breath.

I had been holding mine for eight months.

I stood outside his study door for a full minute before I opened it.

Not because I was afraid of what I would find. I had already decided what I was looking for, and I had already decided I was going to look for it. The minute outside the door was something else, the last moment before knowing something you couldn’t unknow, the pause before you stepped off a ledge you had been standing at the edge of for longer than you wanted to admit.

I opened the door.

The study smelled like him. Leather and something expensive and the particular quality of focused silence that accumulated in rooms where serious thinking happened. I had stood in this doorway before, with flowers and a photograph, and been turned away with the polite finality of a man who had decided I did not belong in this space.

He wasn’t here now.

I sat down at his desk.

The laptop was locked, which I had expected. Julian was thorough. He locked everything, his study, his car, his expression, his life. But thorough people had systems, and systems had exceptions, and exceptions were where you found the things people thought they had hidden.

I had been listening for eight months. I had been watching. I had heard things through old walls and around half-closed doors and in the pauses between sentences when Julian thought I had already left the room. I had heard Zane say the passkey in a conversation about the server backup six weeks ago, and I had heard Julian say grandmother’s birthday in the same sentence, and I had filed that away the way I had been filing everything away since I realized that my husband was a man who kept secrets the way other people kept furniture permanently without apology, as a fundamental feature of how he lived.

I typed the date.

The laptop opened.

I sat very still for a moment, looking at the desktop. Then I opened the file directory and looked for what I had come to find.

It took eleven minutes. Julian was organized, which meant the files were labelled, which meant once I understood his system and his system was logical, almost elegant, I could navigate it. Personal files, nested three levels deep, behind a folder labelled Archive inside a folder labelled Legal inside a folder labelled WEG Private.

The subfolder was simply labelled K.

I opened it.

The folder was deep. Years of it, search records, investigator reports, legal correspondence, and scanned documents. I read slowly and methodically, the way I had learned to read things I needed to understand completely rather than quickly.

Julian had been looking for someone. A woman. Six years of looking, from the earliest documents dated the year before our engagement through every year since, consistent and unrelenting and entirely private.

Her name, in the documents, was Kat.

Just Kat. No surname. The investigators had tried to find a surname and failed every time, which told me the surname had been either withheld or genuinely unknown. Given how thorough Julian’s team was, I suspected the latter.

Six years. He had been searching for a woman named Kat for six years. Before we were engaged. Through the engagement. Through the wedding. Through eight months of a marriage that had never once felt like a marriage.

I kept reading.

The investigator reports were detailed and repetitive in the way that unsuccessful searches always were the same dead ends circled from different angles, the same lack of a surname, and the same trail that went cold at the same point every time. Whoever Kat was, she was very good at not being found. Or she simply didn’t know anyone was looking.

I found the marriage certificate forty minutes in.

It was a scanned official Las Vegas document, the kind that got filed in county records and mostly forgotten. Two names. Two first names only, no surnames on either line. Jules and Kat. Witnessed by two people I didn’t recognize. Dated six years ago, the same year the search records began.

I stared at it for a long time.

Jules. I didn’t know anyone named Jules. The name meant nothing to me, not a family connection, not a business associate, not anyone in the Windsor circle I had been carefully mapping since the day I arrived at this estate. Julian had never mentioned a Jules. Nobody had.

And Kat. The same name that ran through six years of search records. The same woman Julian had been paying investigators to find since before he ever agreed to marry me.

The certificate was real; I could see that from the official seal, the registration number, and the formatting. A genuine Las Vegas marriage. But it wasn’t Julian’s name. It was Jules. And I didn’t know who Jules was.

I sat with the confusion of it. The document was in Julian’s private encrypted files. That meant it mattered to him. That meant Jules and Kat mattered to him. But I couldn’t see the shape of it yet. I couldn’t see how it connected to me or to our marriage or to the specific cold distance my husband maintained with someone who had decided, long before I arrived, that I was never going to be let in.

I didn’t cry. What I felt was not sadness. It was the cold, clarifying sensation of pieces that didn’t fit yet but would of a picture assembling itself from the edges inward, taking its time, demanding patience.

I had patience. Eight months of this marriage had given me an extraordinary amount of patience.

I closed the folder. I closed the laptop. I sat at Julian’s desk in his leather-and-silence study for a moment longer, looking at nothing.

Then I stood up, straightened my clothes, and walked out. I pulled the door closed behind me with the same care I had used to open it quietly, completely, leaving no evidence that I had been here at all.

In the east sitting room, I sat down and took out the small leather notebook I kept in my bag, the one nobody knew about, the one I had been filling quietly for months—and I opened it to a fresh page.

At the top I wrote: Kat. Jules. Six years. Las Vegas.

Then I sat for a long time, pen in hand, staring at those four words.

I didn’t know who Jules was. I didn’t know who Kat was. I didn’t know how any of it connected to Julian or to our marriage or to the life I had walked into with my eyes open and understood far less than I thought I had.

But I knew this: my husband had been searching for a woman for six years with the obsessive, unrelenting focus of someone who had never stopped wanting something he lost.

And I was not that woman. That was enough to start with.

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