Chapter Fifteen
Clementine
He asked to sit with me for just ten minutes, and I agreed, deliberately choosing a bench in the small courtyard behind Second Door rather than my own private office, because I wanted this particular conversation to happen somewhere that belonged entirely, unambiguously to me alone.
“I keep thinking about everything I gave up for you,” he said quietly, and I watched him hear the actual sentence as it left his own mouth, watched him understand, a full half-second too late, exactly how it was inevitably going to land between us in that moment.
“I know you do,” I said, my voice even and unhurried despite everything.
“You have told me, directly or otherwise, more times over these past several weeks than in all six years combined before them. You gave up a palace, Byron. You gave up a formal royal title, an entire place in the line of succession, a whole life of rigid ceremony you’d already told me yourself, more than once, you found genuinely suffocating half the time regardless of the perks.
” My voice stayed carefully level, because I’d rehearsed this particular painful truth to myself so many times over the past three days alone that it no longer felt remotely like an accusation aimed at him, only a plain, simple fact I was finally choosing to speak aloud, in daylight, where it could be properly, honestly examined.
“I gave you every single part of the life I built entirely with my own two hands, out of absolutely nothing at all, starting in a cold, parked car on a street I still genuinely can’t drive down today without my chest going tight involuntarily.
I gave up my entire privacy the exact day the whole world decided my survival was your rescue story instead of recognizing it as my own hard-won, singular accomplishment.
I have spent six full years being called a living fairy tale, Byron, when what I actually was, long before you ever once walked into that shelter, was simply a woman who had already, completely saved herself, without any help at all from any prince. ”
“I know that. I have genuinely always known that, Clem, deep down.”
“Then why does every single crisis end the exact same way? With me asked, gently or otherwise, to quietly disappear a little more each time, for the greater good of your family, while you keep your considerable billions and your thriving business and your last name fully intact through every single one of them?” I turned fully to face him directly on the bench.
“You were never actually rescuing me, Byron. I genuinely need you to hear that clearly now, not simply agree politely with it out loud because it’s easier.
You met a woman who had already, painstakingly rebuilt her entire life from the ground up, brick by brick, and somehow, over the course of six long years, your family managed to convince both of us that loving me was the real sacrifice in this marriage, and my survival was the actual miracle, when the honest truth is I earned my own life the exact same way anyone genuinely earns anything worthwhile in this world.
Through years of hard, unglamorous work.
Completely alone. Long before you ever once showed up at that shelter’s front door. ”
He didn’t try to argue back at all, which I genuinely gave him real credit for, even in that raw, difficult moment.
He simply sat quietly with it, his hands loose and open between his knees, and when he finally spoke again his voice had entirely lost the pleading edge it had carried earlier in our conversation together.
“What do you actually need from me right now, honestly?”
“I honestly don’t fully know yet myself.
” I stood up slowly from the bench, because I could feel the conversation steadily reaching the outer edge of what I genuinely had room to give that particular day.
“I am going to talk to a proper lawyer this week, Byron. I need you to know that’s already happening, not as any kind of threat on my part, just as a plain, simple fact, the exact same way you should have been telling me facts these past six difficult weeks instead of carefully managing them all around me behind closed doors, without my knowledge. ”
“Okay.” He stood too, and for one brief moment I genuinely thought he might reach for me, and I felt real relief when he didn’t, because I honestly don’t think I could have withstood that particular touch just then, not with everything still so raw and unresolved between us.
“I am not going to fight you at all on the lawyer, and I am not going to send flowers or make some kind of public scene or try desperately to buy my way back into your good graces with grand, empty gestures. I just need you to know I am not giving up on us, Clem, even if I fully understand why you might genuinely need to, given everything that’s happened. ”
He left without another word after that, walking slowly back toward the street where, I noticed, he’d arrived entirely alone that particular day, no car idling and waiting for him nearby, no security quietly trailing behind him anywhere, just a man in a wrinkled, slept-in coat disappearing gradually down a familiar block I’d personally walked a thousand times before entirely on my own, long before he had ever once known my actual name at all.
I went back inside and found Aria waiting near the front desk, having clearly watched the entire exchange through the glass without intruding on it. She didn’t ask what had been said, just fell into step beside me as we walked back toward my office together.
“You okay?”
“I don’t know yet. I think I actually meant everything I said to him, which is new. For weeks I’ve been saying things to make the conversation end faster. That one I meant all the way through.”
“That’s probably a good sign,” Aria said. “Not for the marriage, necessarily. For you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you sounded like someone who knows exactly what she needs, instead of someone who’s scrambling to figure out what she’s allowed to want.” She squeezed my arm briefly as we reached my office door. “Whatever happens with Byron, that’s worth something on its own.”
I sat down at my desk afterward and pulled up the lawyer’s number James had recommended, a woman who specialized in exactly this kind of situation, complicated marriages with complicated public dimensions, and made the appointment for later that week, my hand steady on the phone in a way it hadn’t been in days.
Whatever came next, I intended to walk into it with my eyes fully open, making my own decisions on my own timeline, rather than simply reacting to whatever Byron’s family decided to do next.