Chapter Twenty-Two
Byron
Months passed steadily in careful, deliberate increments after that Sunday, each individual week its own small test I hadn’t fully realized I was actively taking until I’d already, somehow passed it successfully.
I maintained warm, private contact with both Gareth and Violet throughout this entire period, entirely separate from any official royal capacity whatsoever, and let my relationship with my own parents cool gradually into something distant but civil between us, neither fully reconciled nor entirely severed completely, a deliberately unresolved space I genuinely understood might realistically stay exactly that way for years to come, possibly permanently.
My father made one final, calculated attempt that particular autumn, a call I genuinely hadn’t expected to receive at all, offering to formally restore my place within the foundation’s advisory structure, a partial return to relevance within the very family that had once entirely defined my whole sense of personal worth and identity.
“One condition attached, naturally,” he said, his voice as perfectly level as ever, betraying nothing.
“You attend the winter gala representing the family publicly. Alone, without Clementine present at all. It would go a considerable way toward repairing the public narrative surrounding your many years away from public royal life.”
“No,” I said, simply and calmly, entirely without the sharp anger that would have almost certainly colored this exact same conversation six months earlier. “I am genuinely not remotely interested in repairing a narrative that required erasing my own wife just to construct in the first place.”
“She may not even still technically be your wife by the time winter fully arrives,” he said, not unkindly exactly, just stating it as a plain fact, in the same measured, careful way he tended to deliver most difficult truths to people.
“Then I’ll decline your offer as a divorced man instead of as a married one,” I said evenly. “The answer genuinely doesn’t change either way, Father, regardless of my precise marital status by then.”
I told absolutely no one at all about that particular offer afterward, not because I wanted any credit whatsoever for having turned it down, but because I had finally, truly learned that the real value of a choice like that one lived entirely in whether I could make it cleanly and quietly, without any audience watching or keeping score.
Violet found out about it anyway, months later, entirely by accident, from an offhand comment my father happened to make casually during a family dinner, and she told Clementine about it herself, without my knowledge or involvement at all in the telling, which I only discovered myself when Clementine mentioned it directly to me, weeks after the actual fact, in a tone that told me clearly she’d been quietly testing all along whether my private behavior genuinely, consistently matched my public statements.
“Violet told me about the winter gala offer your father made you,” she said, the two of us walking slowly together through that same familiar park where we’d first started talking again, months earlier now. “You never once mentioned any of it to me yourself, not a single word.”
“There genuinely wasn’t anything worth mentioning to you about it. I said no immediately, without hesitation. That was the entire story, start to finish, nothing more to it.”
“That’s exactly why I genuinely needed to hear about it from someone else first,” she said, and something in her voice in that moment, some careful new warmth I hadn’t heard directed at me in a very long time, told me I’d finally passed a private test I hadn’t even fully realized I was still actively taking, month after month.
“I needed to know for absolute certain that you’d make the exact same choice whether or not I was ever even going to eventually find out about any of it at all. ”
“Does it change anything, now that you do know?”
She considered the question seriously, the way she considered most things, turning it over before answering.
“It doesn’t make me trust you all at once, if that’s what you’re asking.
It’s not a switch. But it’s one more piece of evidence in a pile I’ve been quietly building for months, and the pile is getting harder to argue with. ”
We kept walking, past a group of children feeding stale bread to a small, indignant flock of ducks, and I found myself, for the first time in a long while, not rushing to fill the silence with reassurance, simply letting the pile speak for itself the way she’d described it.
“Gareth’s asking about you,” I said instead. “Not in any particular way. He just brings you up sometimes, wants to know how you’re doing.”
“Tell him I’m doing well. Tell him I’m glad he’s recovering.” A small, genuine smile crossed her face. “I actually went to see him myself, a few weeks ago. Violet took me. I didn’t tell you because I wanted it to be mine, not something that happened because of you.”
Something in my chest tightened pleasantly at that, an old family thread quietly mending itself in a direction I hadn’t engineered at all, hadn’t even known about until she offered it freely.
“I’m glad,” I said, and found I meant it completely, that her choosing to rebuild that particular bridge on her own terms, without my involvement, mattered more to me than if I’d orchestrated it myself.