Chapter Five
Byron
The luncheon fit me like a coat I’d forgotten I still owned somewhere in the back of a closet, its sleeves settling onto my shoulders as though no real time at all had passed since I’d last worn it comfortably.
I stood at the head of a gilded private dining room in a suit Amy’s team had pressed and delivered directly to the townhouse that morning, greeting arriving donors by name as they filed in because Eric had personally briefed me thoroughly the night before, spending nearly a full hour walking me carefully through each guest’s history with the foundation, their preferred charitable causes, the small personal details that made a prince appear genuinely attentive rather than merely well-informed by a staffer.
For the length of one short, unscripted speech about the housing initiative, delivered entirely without notes, I felt the particular, familiar ease of doing something I had once been trained from birth to do exceptionally well, a fluency sitting deep in my own bones that I hadn’t consciously accessed in years.
I hated how good it genuinely felt in that moment.
I want that stated plainly here, because it matters enormously to everything that happened afterward.
I stood in that gilded, chandeliered room accepting warm compliments about my composure, about how naturally I still carried myself despite six full years away from any of it, and some old, hungry part of me sat up sharply and paid close attention in a way it genuinely hadn’t in a very long time, a part of myself I had honestly, sincerely believed I’d left entirely behind when I first moved permanently to New York.
Penelope was seated at the second table that afternoon, which I hadn’t personally been told to expect in advance and clearly should have specifically asked about the night before, given everything else.
She rose gracefully when I approached to greet her table properly, offering her hand with the same cool, practiced grace I remembered clearly from a full decade earlier, back when our respective families had quietly, mutually assumed we’d eventually marry each other, back before I had ever once walked into a shelter and met a woman who made every single one of those old assumptions feel impossibly, irrelevantly small by direct comparison.
“It’s good to see you looking so well, Byron,” she said, her voice pitched low and even across the small distance between us. “New York clearly agrees with you. You look considerably lighter than I remember from before.”
“Thank you sincerely for coming today. I know my father genuinely appreciates the visible show of support, especially given everything currently happening with Gareth.”
“He does appreciate it deeply. He’s actually mentioned as much to me more than once now, in passing.
” Something flickered briefly behind her composed eyes, gone again before I could properly name what it had been.
“I understand you’re quite thoroughly occupied this particular week, with everything going on. ”
“Busy, yes. Very busy indeed.” I didn’t linger at her table for long, kept the entire polite exchange well under two minutes, and moved on deliberately to the next donor waiting nearby, then the next after that.
I want to be entirely clear here that nothing whatsoever occurred between Penelope and me that particular afternoon that I would have hesitated for even a single second to describe to Clementine in complete, unflinching detail afterward.
My guilt, when it eventually arrived in full force weeks later, was never once actually about desire on my part.
It was about simple proximity instead, and about precisely who had deliberately arranged that specific proximity, and precisely why they’d bothered going to the trouble at all.
Amy found me afterward near the coat check station, phone already in hand, scrolling through something with visible, undisguised satisfaction on her face.
“We got a genuinely great shot of you and Penelope standing together by the window,” she said, turning the phone screen toward me for inspection. “It’s going straight into tonight’s event recap piece we’re sending out to our full press list.”
“I wasn’t aware there was any photographer stationed anywhere particularly near that specific table.”
“There’s always a photographer positioned somewhere, Byron, at literally every single event we run for this family.
” She said it lightly, almost fondly, as though I’d innocently asked an endearingly naive question about how the world actually worked.
“It’s a genuinely good photograph, objectively speaking.
It reads extremely well to our more traditional donor base specifically.
They like visible continuity, and Penelope reads clearly as continuity to that particular demographic, whether either of you personally intends anything at all by it. ”
“Clementine reads as my actual wife,” I said, my voice sharper than I’d fully intended it to come out, carrying further across the room than I meant it to.
“Of course she does, obviously, and no one on this team is suggesting otherwise for a moment.” Amy’s professional smile didn’t waver even slightly at my tone.
“This isn’t remotely about replacing anyone, Byron, truly, I promise you that.
It’s simply about carefully managing optics during an especially sensitive week for the entire foundation.
One single photograph. It genuinely isn’t a story of any kind unless someone specifically decides to make it into one, and we certainly won’t be the ones doing that on purpose. ”
I let the whole exchange go, because the summit itself sat only two days out and Gareth’s major surgery loomed just three days beyond that, and I had exactly enough personal vigilance available to spend on one genuine crisis at a time, and that particular week, without consciously deciding to, I chose Gareth’s crisis over everything else.
That is the plain, entirely unglamorous truth of what actually happened: I ran out of careful attention before I ever ran out of active threats to my own marriage, and I spent what little I had remaining on my brother instead of on my wife, telling myself repeatedly and reassuringly that the imbalance was purely temporary, that everything would naturally balance itself back out once the surgery was safely behind all of us and normal life fully resumed its usual, familiar shape.
The photograph itself appeared online that same evening, cropped tightly enough that Penelope and I appeared, to any casual viewer scrolling past, to be the only two people present in the entire crowded room.
A gossip account I’d genuinely never once heard of before that exact day ran it prominently beside a breathless headline openly asking whether the prince’s marriage might finally be cooling off for good.
I called Amy the moment I saw it myself, my hand shaking slightly and involuntarily around the phone.
“We need to get ahead of this immediately, tonight,” I said, pacing the length of my office.
“A statement, something simple and entirely direct. Clementine and I are completely fine, the photograph was taken at a routine professional work event, end of story, nothing further to discuss with anyone.”
“If we respond publicly to something like this, we effectively confirm there’s a real story worth responding to in the first place.
” Amy’s voice stayed patient throughout our entire call, the practiced patience of someone experienced at managing a nervous, relatively inexperienced client through his very first genuine press cycle.
“It will be entirely forgotten within forty-eight hours if we simply, calmly ignore it completely. I promise you, Byron, responding publicly right now is the actual mistake here, not staying quiet and letting it pass.”
I believed her, at least partly, because some exhausted part of me genuinely wanted to believe her, and partly because I had no real prior experience navigating any kind of press cycle without an experienced team like hers standing firmly between me and the direct consequences of my own choices.
I called Clementine immediately afterward, hoping desperately to explain everything before she happened to stumble across it somewhere else entirely, and got her voicemail instead, because it was already, quietly too late.
She’d already seen it herself. She was already sitting somewhere alone with it, processing it in silence, the way I would slowly come to understand over the following weeks that she’d already been sitting alone with several other things by then, while I kept telling myself, over and over, that one single lunch and one cropped photograph couldn’t possibly add up to anything genuinely worth worrying about.