Chapter Seventeen
Clementine
Public opinion swung hard and fast in my direction after Byron’s public statement aired, hard enough that I found myself genuinely uncomfortable in an entirely new and unfamiliar way.
Where reporters had spent weeks calling me a calculating opportunist behind closed doors, they now wanted to cast me instead as some kind of wounded saint, a woman who had survived genuine homelessness and then survived a royal family’s calculated, deliberate cruelty on top of it, and I found I disliked this particular second version nearly as much as I’d genuinely despised the first one, because both stories had been written entirely by someone else, about a life that belonged, fully and completely, only to me alone.
“I will give exactly one interview,” I told James firmly, sitting directly across from him in my cluttered office. “On my own carefully chosen terms, with my own specific focus, nobody else’s agenda involved at all.”
He arranged it, at my own specific request, with a journalist I actually genuinely trusted, a woman who had covered housing policy seriously for nearly a full decade and had never once, across years of watching Second Door’s work from a respectful professional distance, asked me a single question about Byron or the royal family directly.
I spent a full forty minutes talking passionately about transitional housing, about the specific systemic policy failures that keep vulnerable people cycling endlessly through shelters instead of moving decisively out of them for good, about Marisol specifically and countless other women just like her, and when the reporter finally asked, gently and near the very end of our conversation, whether I wanted to address the royal coverage directly at all, I gave her exactly one carefully chosen sentence in response.
“I built my life before Byron ever entered it, and I will keep building it regardless of whatever happens between us going forward from here. That’s the entire story I have to offer on that particular subject, and I’d genuinely like to get back to talking about Second Door now, if that’s all right with you. ”
She didn’t push back at all, respecting my clear boundary immediately, and the resulting piece ran precisely the way I had genuinely hoped it would, my nonprofit organization as the true subject of the entire article, my marriage reduced appropriately to a single passing footnote instead of dominating the whole headline the way it had for weeks beforehand.
Gabriel called later that same week with news I genuinely hadn’t expected to hear at all.
“Byron’s legal team reached out to us directly,” he said.
“Quietly, with absolutely no press involved anywhere, no conditions attached to any of it whatsoever. They personally helped us trace the entire security breach back to its original source, confirmed it originated specifically with someone on Eric’s own staff, and got us in direct contact with a highly respected cybersecurity firm that’s now rebuilding our entire records system from scratch, completely free of charge to us. ”
“Did he ask for anything at all in return for doing all that?”
“Nothing whatsoever, not a single thing. He didn’t even want his own name mentioned anywhere in connection with any of it.
I only found out it was actually him because his attorney let it slip accidentally when I asked directly who exactly was footing the considerable bill for all this work.
” Gabriel’s voice carried the particular surprise of a man who had genuinely expected considerably less generosity than this from anyone connected to the situation.
“I thought you would want to know about it directly, regardless of everything else currently going on between the two of you.”
I sat with that particular piece of information for a long while after we finally hung up the phone.
It didn’t undo a single thing that had already happened between us, not really.
It didn’t automatically restore my full trust in him either, not yet, not fully, not by a long shot.
But it told me something genuinely meaningful about the real, underlying difference between the man who had once handed me proof of his family’s cruelty while wearing a coat he’d clearly slept in, desperately hoping the proof alone would somehow fix everything between us instantly, and a man who was now quietly, privately repairing serious damage he himself had caused without needing or actively seeking any credit for it whatsoever, which felt, for the very first time in weeks, like the tentative beginning of a real answer to a question I hadn’t yet fully decided how to properly ask myself.
Marisol got the job that same week, the one she’d been rehearsing her two-line answer for in my office weeks earlier, and she came by Second Door on a Friday afternoon just to tell me in person, still wearing the blazer she’d bought secondhand for the interview, a little too big in the shoulders, her whole face lit up in a way I hadn’t seen from her before.
“They didn’t even ask about the gap,” she said, half laughing, half disbelieving. “I had the whole answer ready and they just didn’t ask.”
“Sometimes that happens,” I said, and meant it, though I also knew, better than most people, that sometimes it didn’t happen that way at all, that sometimes the gap followed you into every room you ever walked into afterward whether anyone asked about it directly or not. “How does it feel?”
“Like I get to actually start now,” she said. “Like the part where I was just surviving is finally over and the part where I get to build something starts today.”
I walked her down to the lobby myself, past the corkboard covered in job postings and childcare flyers, past a woman I recognized from the third floor pushing a stroller toward the elevator that stuck reliably on three, and felt something steady itself in my own chest that had nothing to do with Byron at all, a reminder that whatever was happening in the rest of my life, this particular thing, this building and the women inside it, was still standing exactly where I’d left it, entirely unbothered by headlines.
Gabriel called again a few days later with an update on the security overhaul, the new system finally installed and tested, every old file re-encrypted, every login now requiring two separate credentials instead of one.
“I feel like I can finally breathe again,” he told me.
“I keep thinking about how close we came to losing something we can’t ever get back, women’s trust in this place.
It’s not something you rebuild quickly once it’s gone. ”
“You didn’t lose it,” I said. “You caught it before it actually happened. That’s not the same thing as almost failing, Gabriel. That’s succeeding under pressure.”
He was quiet for a moment on the line. “You sound different than you did a few weeks ago.”
“I feel different,” I admitted, and found, saying it aloud to him, that it was entirely true.