Chapter Ten
Clementine
The argument that finally, completely cracked us wide open happened three full days later, in that exact same kitchen, the very spot where he’d once solemnly promised me none of this would ever, under any circumstances, touch us.
“You let them erase me completely from an event I personally helped build from absolutely nothing,” I said, my voice rising steadily despite every genuine effort to keep it level and controlled.
“You knew it was happening the whole time, and you let it stand without any real fight on your part, and now you’re standing right here telling me it’s only temporary, as if that single fact somehow makes any of it acceptable to me. ”
“I am trying to protect Gareth during the single most vulnerable week of his entire recovery process,” Byron said, his own voice rising sharply to meet mine for the first time in longer than I could clearly remember between us.
“I am trying desperately to hold my entire family together while my own brother slowly relearns how to simply walk across a hospital room without any assistance. I do not have unlimited attention left over to personally fight every single decision Amy’s team happens to make on any given day of the week. ”
“Then spend whatever attention you do have left on your actual wife instead of on your family’s carefully managed public image,” I snapped back at him, and the words landed considerably harder than I’d fully intended them to, and I watched something visibly shift across his entire face in that moment, something old and deeply wounded rising abruptly to the surface after apparently being buried there for who knew how long.
“I gave up an entire throne for you,” he said, his voice actually cracking audibly on the word throne in a way I had genuinely never once heard from him before, not in six years.
“I walked away completely from my entire family, my entire expected future, everything I was carefully raised from birth to eventually become, and I did all of it without a single moment of real hesitation, because loving you mattered infinitely more to me than any of it ever possibly could. Do you honestly have any real idea what that particular decision actually cost me personally, Clem?”
The kitchen went utterly silent in a way that had genuine, tangible physical weight pressing down on both of us, a silence you could almost feel physically pressing against your own skin.
I watched him hear his own words land in the space between us, watched visible regret move rapidly across his entire face almost immediately afterward, but it was already, irrevocably too late by then, because he had finally said the one specific thing that had apparently been sitting coiled tightly underneath every single compromise he’d quietly asked of me for weeks now, the private, ongoing ledger he’d evidently been keeping this entire time without ever once telling me directly that he was even keeping it at all.
“You gave up a palace,” I said quietly, once I finally trusted my own voice enough to speak again without it audibly breaking apart.
“I gave you every single part of the life I fought for with my own two bare hands, completely and utterly alone, starting from absolutely nothing at all, from a cramped, parked car outside a laundromat on Flatbush Avenue. I gave up my entire privacy the exact day reporters first started calling me a homeless woman a prince had generously taken pity on, instead of recognizing me as a person who had already fully rebuilt herself, brick by brick, long before he ever once walked through that shelter’s front door.
You were never, not once, the only person who sacrificed something enormous for this marriage, Byron.
You have simply been the only one of us quietly keeping score this entire time, silently tallying it all up. ”
“That is genuinely not at all what I meant to say to you just now.”
“It’s exactly what you meant, Byron. You simply never said any of it directly out loud until tonight, right here in this kitchen, after apparently weeks of it steadily building up quietly inside you.
” I felt something deep in my chest go strangely quiet and perfectly clear all at once, the particular clarity that only ever seems to arrive after you’ve spent weeks carefully circling around a difficult truth and have finally allowed yourself to fully land on it.
“I genuinely think some part of you has been treating your original sacrifice like a debt I somehow owe ongoing interest on, every single week, indefinitely, without end. Every single time your family asks me to shrink myself a little further, you privately remember exactly what you once gave up for me, and it makes it that much easier, psychologically, to ask me to give up one more thing on top of everything else already given. It has to stop right now, Byron. Not because your original sacrifice wasn’t genuinely real, because it absolutely, completely was real.
It has to stop because mine was equally real too, and I am completely, entirely done pretending it doesn’t count for anything at all in this marriage of ours. ”
He didn’t have any real answer ready for that, not one that adequately met the true size of the moment between us, and I watched him reach desperately for something, anything at all, and come up entirely empty-handed in the end, watched the full weight of what he’d just said finally, completely settle into his face like a heavy stone slowly dropping through still, deep water.
I took the guest room that particular night, carrying a single pillow and one change of clothes down the long hallway while he stood frozen in the kitchen doorway behind me, not stopping me at all, not saying another word.
He left early the very next morning for gala rehearsals before either one of us had managed to find the right words to properly close the sudden distance that had opened up so quickly between us, and I lay awake for a long while in a bed that genuinely wasn’t fully mine, in a marriage that suddenly felt like it belonged entirely to someone else’s different version of the two of us, wondering silently how many more small, individually forgivable erasures it would ultimately take before there was truly nothing left of me remaining in this shared life for anyone, including myself, to ever find again.
I heard him leave in the early morning, the quiet click of the front door, the elevator’s distant hum, and lay there afterward listening to the apartment settle back into silence around me.
Around seven, my phone buzzed with a text from Aria, a simple you up?
that I answered honestly: awake. not sure I ever actually slept.
She showed up twenty minutes later with coffee and a bag of pastries from the place on the corner, letting herself in with the spare key I’d given her years earlier for exactly this kind of morning, and found me still sitting in the guest room, staring at nothing in particular.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” she said, setting the coffee down beside me. “But I brought the good croissants, so you should at least eat something.”
“He said he gave up a throne for me.” My voice came out flatter than I intended, worn down from the sleepless night. “Like it’s a debt I’m supposed to keep repaying. Six years, and I never once heard him say it that way before last night.”
“Maybe he never let himself think it that way before last night,” Aria said carefully. “Doesn’t make it less true that he said it now, or less true that it hurt you to hear it.”
“I keep waiting to feel like I overreacted. Like if I just wait long enough, this will settle back into something normal and I’ll feel silly for how upset I got.” I finally looked at her directly. “It’s not settling, though. It’s just sitting there, exactly as loud as it was last night.”
“Then maybe it’s not supposed to settle,” she said gently. “Maybe it’s supposed to actually get addressed instead of quietly absorbed, the way you’ve absorbed things for six years without saying anything.”
I sat with that for a long moment, the coffee going lukewarm in my hands, and understood, with a clarity that frightened me slightly, that she was right, that I had spent six years quietly absorbing small costs I’d never once fully named out loud, and that whatever came next in my marriage would have to start with actually naming them.