Chapter Four
Clementine
By the following week, one single meeting had somehow, gradually become four separate ones, each additional one explained away individually with a reason that sounded, taken entirely on its own, perfectly reasonable and impossible to reasonably argue against.
“It’s the summit prep,” he told me Monday evening, arriving home well past eight o’clock, his tie already loosened at the collar, his voice carrying the particular fatigue of a man who’d spent his entire day performing careful composure for people he didn’t fully trust anymore.
“They need someone completely briefed on the housing initiative now, since I’m apparently the one presenting parts of it myself, given that Gareth obviously can’t. ”
“It’s just the gala committee today,” he said Wednesday evening, barely pausing at the front door before disappearing straight into the study to take yet another incoming call. “An hour, maybe two at the absolute most. I’ll be quick about it, I promise.”
“You told me directly that helping Gareth wouldn’t change our life together,” I reminded him Thursday night, the two of us still sitting in our work clothes at nearly nine o’clock, takeout containers slowly going cold and forgotten on the counter between us because neither of us had actually managed to eat anything yet.
“You’ve missed dinner four nights running now, Byron. That’s the entire week, minus tonight.”
“Clem, my brother is having open-heart surgery in five days.” His voice carried an edge I genuinely wasn’t used to hearing directed squarely at me, sharp enough that I flinched slightly before I could stop myself from reacting.
“I am trying very hard to make sure his entire life’s work is still standing intact when he finally wakes up from that surgery.
I genuinely don’t know how to accomplish that particular goal in fewer hours than I’ve already been putting in every single day. ”
“I am not asking you to abandon Gareth, and I would honestly never ask that of you, not ever.” I kept my own voice carefully level, deliberately, because I had learned a long time ago that raising it in response only ever gave people a convenient excuse to stop hearing the actual words and start reacting purely to the volume instead.
“I am asking you to remember what you specifically promised me in this exact kitchen just two weeks ago. Tell me before something costs us, Byron. That was the entire ask. One simple thing.”
He exhaled slowly, and some of the sharp edge finally went out of his shoulders, out of his tired voice. “You’re right. I’m genuinely sorry, truly. It’s an enormous amount right now, more than I think I’ve even let myself fully admit, even to you.”
I let it go that particular night, because it was undeniably true that his brother’s surgery loomed heavily over every single conversation we had that week, casting a long shadow even over our smallest disagreements, and because I loved him completely, and because loving someone properly means giving them real room to be imperfect during the very worst weeks of their family’s collective life.
What I didn’t yet fully understand, standing there in that kitchen with cold takeout sitting untouched between us, was that the room I gave him that particular night would quietly become the standing precedent for every subsequent room I’d be asked to give afterward, each one slightly larger than the last, each one carefully justified by the exact same unassailable, sympathetic reason.
James called Friday morning, his voice carrying the particular careful quality it always took on whenever he had genuinely bad news to deliver as gently as the news itself would reasonably allow.
“A couple of major outlets are asking pointed questions about your background,” he said, without much preamble.
“Specific questions, Clementine. Exact dates, old addresses, which particular shelter you actually stayed at during those months. Details that were never public before, not once, not across six full years of people occasionally trying to dig.”
My stomach dropped straight through the floor of my office. “Where would they even get information that specific?”
“I honestly don’t know yet, but I’m personally looking into it right now, today.
” A pause, heavy with things he clearly wasn’t yet ready to say aloud to me.
“I wanted you to hear this directly from me first, before you accidentally stumbled across it somewhere else entirely, without any warning at all.”
That same afternoon, Eric called Byron directly rather than routing the conversation properly through James first, and Byron relayed the entire exchange to me over the phone an hour later in a flat, careful voice that sounded, disturbingly, like he was simply reading aloud from a script someone else had already written for him.
“He thinks it would genuinely be wise if you skipped the foundation luncheon on Tuesday,” Byron said, the words coming out rushed, almost rehearsed.
“Just until all the reporting settles down naturally on its own. He’s worried a fresh news cycle about your background could seriously distract from Gareth’s surgery coverage, and honestly, Clem, given the sensitive timing of everything, I don’t entirely disagree with him on this one.
It’s just one single lunch, out of dozens of other events. ”
I stood alone in our bedroom with the phone pressed hard against my ear, watching the city lights slowly come on one by one across the darkening skyline outside our window, and felt something small and very specific quietly give way somewhere deep inside my chest, a door I hadn’t fully realized was even still standing until I heard it click shut firmly somewhere behind me.
“It’s one lunch,” I repeated back to him slowly, testing the actual shape of those words in my own mouth for the first time. “Okay. Fine. For Gareth’s sake.”
“Thank you for understanding, Clem. I know none of this is remotely easy for you right now.”
I hung up the phone and sat on the edge of our bed for a long while afterward, turning that particular sentence over and over carefully in my mind.
For Gareth. I had said it out loud like it was a freely given gift, and yet somehow it had landed somewhere deep in my chest like the very first stone of something far heavier being quietly, carefully constructed all around me, though I couldn’t yet make out the eventual, full shape of whatever structure it was slowly, patiently becoming.
I didn’t sleep well that night, lying awake beside Byron while he slept, apparently untroubled, his breathing even and unhurried in a way mine wasn’t.
Somewhere around two in the morning I gave up on sleep entirely and went to sit in the kitchen with the lights off, the city’s glow through the windows enough to see by, and found myself doing something I hadn’t done in years: mentally cataloging every small accommodation I’d made for his family since the day we married, looking for the pattern I suddenly suspected had always been there, quietly, waiting for the right crisis to activate it.
The wedding card. The single stilted visit.
The years of careful distance that I’d told myself, at the time, was simply how royal families operated, formal and reserved by nature, nothing personal in it.
Six years of small, individually forgivable absences that I had never once added together into a total sum, because doing the math felt petty, felt like keeping score in a marriage that otherwise worked.
Sitting there in the dark, I did the math anyway, for the first time, and didn’t like the number it produced.
Byron found me there in the morning, curled in the corner of the couch with a cold cup of tea I’d made hours earlier and never touched, and something in his face shifted when he saw me, a flicker of concern he tried to smooth over before I could fully register it.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said.
“Not really, no.”
“Is it the luncheon?”
“It’s everything, Byron. It’s the luncheon, and it’s the twelve weeks of paper in that room, and it’s six years of small things I never let myself add up before now.
” I looked up at him from the couch, still wrapped in the blanket I’d pulled around myself sometime in the night.
“I need you to actually notice when this starts costing something. Not because I told you to notice. Because you see it yourself, before I have to point it out.”
“I will,” he said, and crouched down in front of me, taking the cold mug from my hands and setting it aside. “I promise you, Clem, I will.”
I wanted, badly, to believe him completely in that moment. I let myself believe him mostly, which felt, at the time, like more than enough.