24. Christine
— ? —
Christine
The press conference isn’t at some fancy hotel. No podium with the B-Morgan Industries logo. No team of lawyers flanking me like bodyguards.
It’s in front of our building. The penthouse towering above. Real. Grounded. Home.
I chose this deliberately.
The reporters swarm the moment I step outside. Cameras flash. Microphones thrust toward my face. Questions shouted over each other in a cacophony of accusation and curiosity-
“Mrs. Morgan, do you have a response to the allegations?”
“Is it true your husband made employees cry?”
“Are you standing by him despite-”
“I have a statement,” I say, and my voice cuts through the noise like a blade.
Silence falls.
I look directly into the cameras. Somewhere behind them, I know Benedict is watching from the window, Isabella in his arms. I don’t look up. I don’t need to. I can feel him - his fear, his hope, his absolute faith that I know what I’m doing even though I’m terrified.
I take a breath.
“Six years ago, I married Benedict Morgan. And for two of those years, I was miserable.”
Murmurs ripple through the crowd. This isn’t what they expected.
“He worked hundred-hour weeks. He missed anniversaries, birthdays, holidays. He was so focused on building his empire that he forgot to build our marriage. I gave birth to our daughter alone while he was on a plane with a dead phone. And while I was being stitched up, a photograph of him raising a glass turned up on my screen, posted by the woman who had spent twelve hours making sure my messages never reached him.”
I pause. Let that land.
“So when I read these headlines-’cold,’ ‘ruthless,’ ‘incapable of human emotion’ - I understand why people believe them. Because I lived with that version of him. I know exactly how absent he can be. How consumed by work. How impossible it feels to reach him when he’s drowning.”
A reporter tries to interrupt. I hold up my hand.
“I’m not finished.”
The reporter shuts up.
“Here’s what those headlines don’t tell you.
” My voice strengthens, finds its footing.
“They don’t tell you that when I filed for divorce, he didn’t fight me with lawyers.
He showed up at my mother’s apartment every day with groceries.
He learned to change diapers from YouTube.
He held our daughter for hours while she screamed with colic, walking circles in a tiny living room, never once asking for relief. ”
I feel something burning in my chest. Something that might be anger, might be love, might be both.
“They don’t tell you that he stepped down as CEO. That he chose being present for bath time and bedtime stories over board meetings. That he sat in my mother’s kitchen learning to make her pot roast because he wanted to be part of our family traditions.”
I take a breath.
“The man those articles describe? I married him. I know him. I left him.” My eyes blaze into the cameras.
“And the man I’m standing here defending today?
He’s not that person anymore. He did the hardest thing a person can do.
He looked at himself honestly, saw what he’d become, and changed.
The gifts weren’t what changed my mind. He gave me a penthouse and I left the deed sitting in an envelope on my mother’s counter for a month.
What changed my mind was the ordinary days.
Time. Presence. Showing up, every single day, and proving he could be better. ”
I step forward, closer to the cameras.
“Now let me tell you about the woman behind these ‘anonymous sources.’”
The crowd goes still.
“Pauline Hartley was my husband’s VP of Operations.
She was also systematically undermining our marriage for two years.
She intercepted my calls while I was in labor.
She posted photos designed to look like an affair.
She whispered in his ear while I was home alone, pregnant, wondering if my husband still loved me. ”
My voice turns to steel.
“And when that didn’t work - when he fired her, when he chose his family, when he refused to be the man she wanted him to be - she decided to destroy him.
She coordinated these stories. She fed reporters half-truths and outright lies.
She took the worst moments of a man trying to change and weaponized them. ”
I look directly into the main camera.
That’s when I see her.
Back of the crowd, behind the third row of cameras. Collar up, head down. She came. Of course she came - she was never going to watch this on a screen when she could stand inside it.
She isn’t wearing white. First time since I’ve known her.
For a second I lose the thread of my own sentence. Then I find it again, and I find something better with it.
“Pauline.” I say her name into the microphone, and forty reporters turn around at once. “Don’t go anywhere. You’ll want to hear this part.”
I smile. It’s not a nice smile.
“I sat across a table from you once and told you that you weren’t worth my energy. That I wouldn’t destroy you.” My chin lifts. “I meant it. But then you came for my family.”
“I have the message his assistant sent you at ten past one in the morning, telling you I was in labor. I have your reply eleven minutes later, promising to pass it on. I have corridor footage of you standing outside his suite at quarter past two with his phone in your hand, and then walking away without knocking. And I have the photograph you posted while I was being stitched up - the one you took the evening before, and held.”
I tilt my head, letting the words sink in.
“My husband’s legal team has already filed civil suits for defamation, tortious interference, and fraud. The criminal referrals for computer fraud and identity theft went to the District Attorney this morning.”
The crowd is absolutely silent now.
“You wanted to destroy Benedict Morgan? You failed. All you did was show me exactly who I married - a man worth fighting for.” My chin lifts higher. “And you showed him exactly who he married - a woman who fights back.”
She doesn’t stay for the rest.
She turns to go, and the crowd doesn’t part for her the way crowds have always parted for the people in her orbit.
It closes in. Phones up, shouting her name like it’s a headline instead of a person.
She gets maybe twenty feet before she has to put a hand in front of her face, and somebody yells did you do it, Pauline, did you do it, and the camera that was pointed at me all morning swings around and follows her down the block.
That’s the last time I ever see her.
I keep waiting to feel triumphant about it. I don’t. I feel like a woman watching somebody else’s consequences arrive from a safe distance, with her daughter upstairs and her husband on his way down.
It’s enough.
I turn back to the broader crowd.
“Having struggles is not a scandal. Difficult pasts are not disqualifications. And loving someone through their worst moments is not weakness - it’s courage. My husband was not perfect. He may never be perfect. But he is trying. Every single day. And that matters more than any headline.”
I take a breath. Steady myself for the final part.
“Now. I believe my husband has something he’d like to say.”
The crowd turns.
Clara took Isabella out of his arms at the top of the stairs. I find out later that he handed our daughter over without a word and then stood there for three full seconds, gathering himself, before he opened the door.
Benedict is walking through them.
He looks like hell - unshaven, eyes red, wearing jeans and a sweater instead of his usual armor of suits. He looks human. Broken. Real.
He stops a few feet short of me. Then, before he says anything at all, he turns and looks straight into the cameras, and I understand that this is what he came down here to do.
“My wife just told you who I’ve become,” he says. His voice is not steady. “She wasn’t there for the part I owe to somebody else.”
The shouting stops.
“Some of the people in those articles are lying. Some of them are not. I know which is which, and so do they.” He swallows.
“I had an assistant who cried in a stairwell because I told her a mistake she made was going to cost people their jobs. It wasn’t going to.
I knew that when I said it. I said it because I was angry and she was there. ”
Nobody moves. Somewhere behind me a camera shutter goes and then stops, like the person holding it thought better of it.
“There are nine of those. I’ve been writing the list since before any of this was printed, because I already knew the names.
I’m going to call every one of them myself.
Not through a lawyer, and not from a sidewalk with cameras on me.
What they do with the call is theirs to decide, and if the answer is nothing, that’s theirs too. ”
“And the rest of it?” a reporter calls.
“The rest was manufactured by a woman who wanted to hurt me, and my wife has just shown you how.” He looks back at the cameras one more time. “Those are two different conversations. I’m not going to let anyone fold them into one. That includes me.”
Then he turns to me, and the world goes quiet at the edges.
He stops in front of me.
The cameras go wild.
He doesn’t look at them. He only looks at me.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Christine-” His voice breaks. “I spent two years making you feel invisible. Small. Like you didn’t matter. And you just stood in front of the entire world and-”
“Fought for you. The way you’ve been fighting for me.” I take his hands. “That’s what marriage is, Benedict. That’s what you taught me these past months. Not grand gestures. Not expensive gifts. Just showing up. Choosing each other. Every day.”
He’s crying. He doesn’t care that cameras are capturing it.
“I don’t deserve you.”
“Probably not.” I smile through my own tears. “But you’re stuck with me anyway.”
He laughs - wet, broken, beautiful.
Then he reaches into his pocket.
My breath catches.
“I was going to wait,” he says. “I had a whole plan. Dinner, flowers, the place we had our first date-”
“Benedict-”
“But I can’t wait. I can’t wait another second.” He sinks to one knee, right there on the sidewalk, cameras flashing, reporters gasping, the whole world watching.
In his hand is a ring. Not the massive diamond from our first engagement. Something smaller. Older. A thin gold band with a single pearl surrounded by tiny diamonds.
My grandmother’s ring. The one Clara kept in a box on her dresser. The one I used to try on as a little girl, spinning in front of the mirror, dreaming of my wedding day.
“Your mother gave this to me,” Benedict says, voice shaking. “Last week. She said her mother wore it for fifty-three years. Through poverty and children and arguments and joy. She said it represented what marriage really is. Not perfection. Endurance. Choosing each other even when it’s hard.”
I can’t breathe.
“I chose wrong for so long. I chose work over you. Ambition over presence. I chose everything except what mattered.” He looks up at me, tears streaming.
“I’m choosing differently now. I choose you.
I choose Isabella. I choose three a.m. feedings and teething nights and fighting about whose turn it is to take out the trash.
I choose all of it. The hard parts and the beautiful parts and everything in between. ”
“Benedict-”
“Renew your vows with me.” His voice cracks completely.
“We never stopped being married. You held those papers for months and you never signed them, and I have been grateful for that every single day since. So don’t marry me again.
Just stand up in front of everyone we love and choose me on purpose this time, knowing exactly what it costs.
Let me spend the rest of my life earning you. Please.”
The world holds its breath.
I sink to my knees in front of him. Take his face in my hands. Kiss him - deep, fierce, a declaration.
“Yes,” I whisper against his mouth. “A thousand times yes. Always yes.”
He slides the ring onto my finger.
It fits perfectly.
The crowd erupts. Cameras flash like lightning. Reporters shout questions neither of us hear.
Benedict pulls me to my feet, sweeps me into his arms, and kisses me like the world isn’t watching.
Like I’m the only thing that exists.
Like I always should have been.