Chapter Eighteen
Clementine
Violet called with fresh, welcome news of Gareth’s continuing recovery, her voice noticeably lighter and warmer than I had heard it sound in weeks.
“The surgery genuinely held up perfectly well. He’s walking the hospital hallway entirely on his own now, mostly just complaining loudly about the hospital food, which the doctors all say is actually a wonderful, encouraging sign of real recovery progress.
He asked about you specifically, you know.
Wanted to know directly whether you were doing all right through all of this. ”
“Tell him I’m genuinely glad he’s healing well,” I said, and meant every single word of it completely, because whatever had gone badly wrong between Byron and me had never once, not for a single moment, been Gareth’s own fault in any way, only the fault of the people around him who had deliberately used his very real, genuine fear as leverage against people who loved him deeply.
I didn’t reopen contact with the rest of the family, though, not yet.
That particular door, I understood clearly in my own mind, would need to stay firmly closed for a good while longer yet, if it ever ended up opening again at all in the future.
Penelope surprised me two days later with a brief, unambiguous public statement of her own, direct and entirely to the point, confirming plainly and clearly that there had never once been anything remotely romantic between herself and Byron, and that the royal communications team had deliberately, knowingly arranged their public proximity purely for calculated optics during his family’s ongoing crisis.
I honestly hadn’t expected her particular honesty in the slightest, and I found myself, somewhat strangely, genuinely grateful for it, one fewer lie left standing upright in a difficult season that had already produced far too many of them for anyone’s real comfort.
James came by my office that same week, sitting across from me with the careful, resigned posture of a man fully preparing himself to be fired on the spot at any moment.
“I compromised far too much with the palace team throughout this entire ordeal,” he said, not waiting for me to speak first at all.
“I told myself I was simply managing the overall situation carefully, keeping a fragile peace between competing interests, but I let them effectively dictate the terms of your entire public life for weeks on end, and I genuinely should have pushed back considerably harder, especially once the leaks first started appearing publicly. I am sorry, Clementine. Genuinely and completely sorry for my part in all of it.”
“I appreciate you saying all of that honestly to my face.” I studied him carefully for a long moment, weighing something I’d been quietly considering ever since the interview had first aired publicly.
“I will keep working with you going forward, but only if your professional loyalty from this exact point forward belongs entirely to Second Door and to me directly, not to any arrangement whatsoever that puts Byron’s family’s comfort above my own personal wellbeing ever again.
If that particular condition presents a genuine conflict for you personally, I understand completely, but I need to hear that clearly from you right now, not discover it the hard way somewhere down the line later. ”
“It’s genuinely not a conflict at all for me,” he said, and something steady and sincere in the way he said it told me he truly meant every single word of it. “It never should have been one in the first place, honestly, looking back on all of this.”
I spent the remainder of that particular week doing the ordinary, grounding work of actually running a nonprofit organization, interviews and careful budget reviews and a persistently leaking radiator on the third floor that finally, genuinely needed a full replacement after months of patchwork fixes, and found, somewhere in the middle of all that familiar, comforting ordinary noise, that the version of myself who existed entirely without Byron present in her daily life was neither meaningfully lesser nor lonelier than I had genuinely feared she might turn out to be.
She was, if anything, more completely and exactly herself than she had been in years, unhidden, entirely unmanaged by anyone else’s careful press strategy, answering to absolutely no one’s narrative but her own, for the very first time in longer than I honestly cared to admit even to myself.
I drove out to the hospital in Valenne exactly once during that stretch, a decision I made alone, without telling Byron beforehand, because I wanted it to be mine and not something folded into whatever fragile truce we were slowly building.
Violet met me at the airport herself, no security, no advance team, just her own rental car and a thermos of coffee she’d brought for the drive.
“He doesn’t know you’re coming,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted him to.”
“I didn’t tell Byron either,” I admitted. “This isn’t about him. I just wanted to see Gareth with my own eyes, see that he’s actually all right.”
Gareth was sitting up in a hospital bed that no longer looked like an emergency, surrounded by get-well cards and a stack of books he was visibly not reading, and when I walked in he looked, for a moment, genuinely startled, then something in his face softened into an expression I hadn’t expected from him.
“I owe you an apology,” he said, before I’d even sat down. “Not for anything I did directly. For what happened to you because of what I needed. I didn’t ask for any of it to happen the way it did, but I also didn’t ask hard enough about how it was happening, and I should have.”
“You were recovering from open-heart surgery, Gareth. I don’t actually hold you responsible for Eric’s choices.”
“Maybe not. But I let myself believe, for a while, that whatever it took to keep the foundation steady was worth it, without asking what ‘whatever it took’ actually meant in practice, for you specifically.” He shifted against the pillows, wincing slightly.
“Byron finally told me everything, once he had the proof. I made him tell me all of it, every detail. I wanted to understand what I’d actually asked of him, and of you, when I called him that night before surgery. ”
I sat with him for nearly an hour, talking about nothing in particular, his physical therapy, Violet’s threat to smuggle in real coffee past the nurses, and found, leaving the hospital that afternoon, that some part of the anger I’d been carrying toward the entire royal family had quietly narrowed itself down to exactly the people who deserved it, and no further.