Chapter Twelve
Clementine
Iwatched the interview unfold from our living room, entirely alone, the city lights outside doing absolutely nothing at all to warm the particular chill that had steadily settled over the entire apartment since I’d moved into the guest room five long days earlier.
The interviewer, a polished woman I recognized instantly from a dozen previous royal specials over the years, asked her carefully prepared question with practiced, gentle care.
“There’s been some considerable speculation lately about your marriage, given the recent coverage.
Any real truth at all to reports that things might be strained between you and your wife right now? ”
Byron’s face on the screen did the exact thing I knew so intimately well by then, the slight, telltale stillness he always wore right before saying something he didn’t fully, personally believe himself. “My wife and I are taking some time to consider what is genuinely best for everyone involved.”
I sat forward sharply on the couch, my heart already sinking.
That wasn’t even the somewhat softened version Amy had originally drafted for him.
It was somehow considerably worse, vaguer still, and it landed exactly the way I imagine he never actually intended it to and exactly the way anyone watching at home that night would inevitably interpret it: a marriage clearly on the verge of ending entirely, a prince quietly, carefully preparing the entire watching public for an eventual, inevitable divorce announcement.
My phone started buzzing insistently within mere minutes of the segment finishing its airing. James called first, his voice tight with barely contained urgency.
“It’s already spreading everywhere online, rapidly,” he said.
“Every single major outlet is running some version of the headline ‘Prince Byron confirms marriage trouble.’ Clementine, I genuinely need you to wait until Byron actually gets home tonight before responding publicly to anything at all. Let him properly explain in person exactly what he really meant to say up there.”
“What could he possibly have meant that isn’t exactly what he said, live, on national television, in front of millions of people?”
James didn’t have a ready answer prepared for that particular question, and his prolonged, uncomfortable silence told me he’d already privately had the exact same troubling thought I was having myself, sitting alone in our darkened apartment, watching my own marriage get narrated live to the entire country by a man who apparently hadn’t found even five spare minutes beforehand to properly warn me directly before he said it, live, on national television, to millions of strangers.
I don’t fully remember the specific moment I actually decided to start packing that night.
I remember standing alone in our bedroom with a suitcase already open on the bed, folding clothes with a strange, mechanical calm that genuinely surprised even me in the moment, my hands moving considerably faster than my racing, chaotic thoughts could reasonably keep pace with.
I took only the true essentials with me, nothing particularly sentimental.
I deliberately left the wedding ring behind on the dresser, not as any kind of overly dramatic gesture on my part, but because it suddenly felt, in that raw moment, like a costume piece belonging entirely to a different story than the one I currently, clearly recognized as genuinely mine.
I wrote him a short note before I finally left, because I genuinely felt I owed him at least that much, even in the raw, wounded state I found myself in.
You don’t have to hide me anymore, Byron. I’m making it easy for both of us now. — C
Aria didn’t ask a single question when I showed up unannounced at her apartment door forty minutes later, suitcase in hand, tears finally starting to fall freely now that I found myself somewhere genuinely safe.
She simply pulled me inside without a single word, put the kettle on immediately without being asked, and let me sit quietly on her couch in complete silence for a long stretch of time before either one of us said anything remotely real to each other.
Somewhere across the sprawling city that night, I knew with absolute certainty, Byron was walking slowly into an entirely empty apartment, discovering a ring left carefully behind on a dresser and a short note written in my own familiar handwriting, and I found, sitting there in Aria’s living room with my knees pulled tightly up against my chest, that I didn’t feel the crushing, overwhelming grief I had fully expected to feel in that particular moment.
I felt something closer to genuine relief instead, the very specific relief of finally, deliberately setting down something impossibly heavy that I’d been quietly carrying alone for weeks without ever fully admitting, even privately to myself, exactly how much heavier it had steadily, quietly become over time.
Aria set a mug of tea in front of me sometime later, though I couldn’t have said how much time had actually passed, the light outside her windows having shifted from evening gold to a flat, indifferent dark.
She sat down across from me on the low coffee table instead of the couch, close enough that our knees nearly touched, and didn’t ask me a single question, which was its own kind of gift.
“I keep waiting to feel like I’ve made a mistake,” I said finally, my voice hoarse from disuse. “Some enormous, catastrophic mistake I can’t take back. I keep waiting for the panic to catch up with the relief.”
“Maybe it will tomorrow,” Aria said. “Or maybe it won’t, and that’ll tell you something too.
” She reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, an old, familiar gesture from college, from a hundred late nights exactly like this one, only younger.
“You don’t have to know tonight which one it is.
Tonight you just get to be somewhere nobody’s managing you. ”
I thought of Byron somewhere across the city, alone in an apartment that had felt, for six years, like the safest place I’d ever lived, and found that even that thought didn’t pull me back toward the door.
My phone sat face-down on the coffee table, buzzing intermittently against the wood, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I let it buzz without reaching for it, without calculating what version of calm I owed whoever was calling.
Aria eventually took it, silenced it without looking at the screen, and set it in a drawer in her kitchen, out of sight, out of reach, and something in me loosened another degree at the simple mechanics of it, the physical fact of a phone I couldn’t hear.
We didn’t talk much more that night. She made up the pullout couch with sheets that smelled like her apartment, like lavender detergent and old books, and I lay there in the dark listening to the city’s ordinary noise through the window, sirens and traffic and someone’s television murmuring through the wall, and understood that whatever came next, I had at least done the one thing I’d been too afraid to do for weeks: I had stopped waiting for someone else to notice how much this was costing me, and simply, finally, told the truth about it myself.