Chapter Eight
Byron
Benjamin found me alone in my office two nights before the surgery, staring blankly at a schedule that had somehow, incrementally, grown to fill every single remaining hour before Gareth went under anesthesia, and he didn’t bother easing gently into whatever he’d clearly come specifically to say to me that night.
“You are letting them run her straight out of her own life,” he said, dropping heavily into the chair directly across from my desk without waiting for any kind of invitation to sit.
“I have personally watched you build an entire company from absolutely nothing over six solid years now, Byron. I have never once, not a single time in all that shared history, seen you let anyone push you around the way you are currently letting your father’s people push Clementine around this particular week, right in front of me. ”
“My brother is having open-heart surgery in forty-eight hours, Benjamin.”
“I am fully aware of that fact. I am genuinely sorry about it too, sincerely, more than I can properly say.” He leaned forward in the chair, elbows braced firmly on his knees, his expression unusually serious for a man who normally kept things fairly light between the two of us.
“I am also telling you plainly and directly that Gareth’s surgery isn’t actually the real reason your wife got quietly, deliberately erased from a gala website just last week.
That particular outcome was a specific choice someone made on purpose, and you let it stand entirely unchallenged because you were simply too distracted by everything else going on to properly fight it at the time. ”
“That’s not entirely fair of you to say to me right now.”
“Maybe it truly isn’t entirely fair, you’re right.
Tell me I’m genuinely wrong about it, though, if you honestly can.
” He waited patiently, watching me steadily across the desk, and I found, sitting there under his direct gaze, that I genuinely couldn’t produce any honest denial that would actually hold up under real scrutiny, and the silence stretching out between us said considerably more in the end than an actual, heated argument possibly could have managed to say.
Gareth called that same night, close to midnight, his voice noticeably smaller and more fragile than I had ever once heard it across our entire lives together as brothers, stripped completely bare of the easy, practiced confidence he’d worn his entire adult life as heir apparent to a throne he’d never once, as far as I honestly knew, seriously questioned wanting for himself.
“I am genuinely frightened, Byron,” he admitted quietly, each individual word visibly costing him something significant even through the strained quality of our transatlantic phone connection.
“If something goes seriously wrong tomorrow morning in that operating room, and the foundation is already visibly unsteady without me personally at the helm of it, and Father is already stretched thin quietly managing whispers about the eventual succession, I need to know for certain that someone reliable is holding all of it together while I’m unconscious under anesthesia.
I need that someone specifically to be you, Byron.
I genuinely cannot ask this particular favor of anyone else remaining in our family. ”
I sat with that raw confession for a long moment, my brother’s genuine fear laid completely bare in a way our reserved family rarely ever permitted itself to openly display, and every single instinct I had spent six careful years training deliberately toward my new life with Clementine went suddenly, entirely quiet in the face of it all.
He was my brother. He had spent his entire adult existence genuinely afraid of eventually failing at the one job he’d been born directly into from birth, and now that particular fear had finally acquired a real shape, a specific date, an actual surgeon’s name attached firmly to it, and he was asking me for the one single thing I had reliably given him throughout our entire shared childhood together: my physical presence, standing firmly between him and the parts of his complicated life he had genuinely never quite learned how to manage entirely on his own.
“I’ll headline the gala,” I heard myself say aloud, the words leaving my mouth before I’d even fully consulted the rest of myself about the decision.
“I’ll cover whatever specifically needs covering until you’re fully back on your feet again, completely recovered.
You focus entirely on simply getting through tomorrow morning in one piece, nothing else matters right now. ”
“Thank you, Byron. Truly, from the bottom of my heart.” The relief in his voice was immediate and entirely audible over the line, and it felt, in that specific, charged moment, like undeniable proof that I had made the correct choice, quite possibly the only choice a genuinely decent brother could reasonably have made under the circumstances.
“I will never forget this, not any part of it, for the rest of my life.”
I told myself, hanging up the phone slowly in the quiet dark of my empty office, that agreeing to headline one single gala event wasn’t remotely the same thing as fully abandoning the boundary I’d carefully promised Clementine just weeks earlier.
I told myself I was simply finishing what I’d already begun, that the entire American schedule would naturally end the very moment Gareth grew strong enough to properly resume his own commitments personally again, that I could give my family this much without it costing my actual marriage anything genuinely real or lasting in the end.
I did not call Clementine that particular night to tell her what I’d just agreed to.
I told myself I would explain the whole thing properly in the morning, once I wasn’t quite so completely exhausted, once I could find genuinely better, gentler words than the ones currently circling round and round in my tired head.
What I did not allow myself to fully examine that night, and would not permit myself to properly examine for several more weeks afterward, was the plain, unglamorous fact sitting quietly directly underneath my carefully constructed excuse: I had made a very specific promise to my own wife in our own kitchen, and I had just quietly broken it again, for the second time now, and some old, deeply trained part of me had already decided, entirely without consulting the rest of me first, that a brother’s genuine fear somehow outweighed a wife’s clearly, repeatedly stated warning, without ever once pausing to properly ask myself whether that particular math was remotely fair to the one woman who had given up genuinely nothing tangible at all when she originally married me and had somehow, over six long years together, ended up quietly paying for all of it anyway, piece by piece.
I woke before dawn the morning of the surgery, unable to sleep any further, and found myself dressed and standing at the window overlooking a city that hadn’t yet begun to stir, turning over a hundred versions of the conversation I still owed Clementine about the gala.
Each version I rehearsed silently sounded worse than the last, more like an excuse dressed up as an explanation, and I finally gave up trying to script it at all, telling myself I would simply say it plainly when the moment came, whatever plainly turned out to mean under the circumstances.
She was already awake when I came back to bed, propped against the pillows scrolling through something on her phone, and I sat down beside her, the words I’d failed to properly rehearse sitting heavy in my chest.
“I need to tell you something before I fly out today,” I said. “I agreed to headline the gala last night. Gareth asked me to, before surgery, and I said yes.”
She set the phone down slowly, and I watched her absorb it, watched the particular stillness come over her that I now recognized, uneasily, as the look of a woman recalculating something in real time. “You told me you’d tell me before you agreed to anything else. Not after.”
“I know. I’m telling you now, as early as I could manage.”
“That’s not the same as before, Byron.” Her voice wasn’t raised, which somehow made it land harder than if it had been.
“But I don’t have it in me to fight about it this morning, not with your brother in an operating room in a few hours.
So go. Be there for him. We’ll talk about the rest of it when you’re back. ”
I left for the airport an hour later carrying that unfinished conversation with me the entire flight, telling myself I’d properly resolve it the moment I returned, not yet understanding how many more mornings just like this one were still waiting ahead of us, each one adding its own small weight to a scale I still hadn’t admitted, even to myself, was already tipping dangerously in one direction.