"Long day." I forced a smile that felt like broken glass. "I think the hospital coffee finally caught up with me."
He nodded, accepting it, his attention returning to the road.
I shoved the phone back in my purse like it was a venomous snake. My hands wouldn't stop trembling. I pressed them against my thighs, willing them to be still.
Sealed therapy records.
Seven years of sessions. The anxious attachment diagnosis. The pattern of choosing broken men I thought I could fix. The depression after my mother died. Every shameful, private thing I'd worked so hard to understand and overcome, laid bare for a courtroom. For reporters. Forhim.
I could see the headlines already:Billionaire's Tutor Exposed: History of Unstable Relationships and Mental Health Struggles.They'd twist everything. Make me look exactly likewhat Victoria claimed: a predator, a gold-digger, an emotionally damaged woman latching onto a wealthy widower.
And Nathaniel would see all of it. Every pathetic pattern. Every broken relationship. Every diagnosis that proved I was exactly the mess I'd spent years pretending I wasn't.
Here was the math, as I understood it:
Option A: Testify. Watch my private pain paraded through a courtroom. Become the unstable gold-digger Victoria wanted me to be. Lose any chance at whatever was growing between Nathaniel and me, because who would want someone this damaged?
Option B: Back off. Let Victoria's lawyers shred my credibility another way. Let her walk. Let her stay in their lives. Let her hurt Millie again.
Some choice. Like asking if I'd prefer to drown or burn.
The worst part? I'd spent years in therapy learning to recognize this exact pattern, the impossible situation where I'd sacrifice myself to save someone else. My therapist would have a field day with this one.
Too bad I couldn't ask her advice without confirming I was exactly the mess Victoria would claim I was.
Tell Nathaniel, and it gets worse.
I looked at him, his profile sharp against the window, his hands steady on the wheel, his eyes focused on the road. He was fighting a dragon in broad daylight, armed with lawyers and evidence and righteous fury.
I was fighting a snake in the dark. And I had to do it alone.
"We'll get through this," he said, as if reading my silence as exhaustion. "Together."
"Together," I echoed. The lie sat heavy on my tongue.
The phone in my purse felt like a grenade with the pin pulled. I didn't know how long I could carry it before it exploded.
But for Millie's sake, for the little girl in the hospital bed who'd trusted me to keep her safe, I'd figure it out.
Even if figuring it out meant losing everything I'd just started to hope for.
Even if it meant carrying this secret until it crushed me.
Nathaniel reached over and squeezed my hand briefly, a gesture of comfort he couldn't know was torture.
"Almost there," he said.
Yes,I thought, staring at the hospital rising ahead of us.Almost there.
But I wasn't sure anymore if "there" was somewhere I wanted to go.
13.Claire
Four days. That's how long it took for my life to go from "complicated" to "about to be eviscerated in open court."
In between, I'd perfected the art of sleeping on hospital chairs, memorized every beep of Millie's monitors, and developed a genuinely unhealthy relationship with the vending machine coffee. The threat sat in my phone like a bomb I couldn't defuse. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw those words:Every self-destructive relationship, every diagnosis, every weakness...
But I also saw Millie's face when she woke up, confused and scared, reaching for my hand.
