I’m here whenever you're ready. No pressure. I love you.
I turned the phone face down on the passenger seat and started the car.
The drive home was a blur of brake lights and swallowed tears. I kept the radio off because silence felt safer than risking a song that might shatter me completely. My hands trembled on the wheel. I almost missed my exit twice.
My apartment building materialized like a mirage, four floors of crumbling brick and questionable plumbing that had never looked more beautiful. This was mine. This was safe. This was the one place where nobody knew about my diagnosis or my testimony or the spectacular public implosion of my dignity.
"Home sweet home," I muttered, fumbling with my keys in the dim stairwell. "Where the only person who judges you is the water stain on the ceiling."
Abraham Lincoln was still there when I walked in, watching me from his spot above the couch with what I chose to interpret as solidarity.I've had bad days too, his expression seemed to say.At least no one shot you.
"Fair point, Abe."
I locked the door, leaned against it, and slid down until I was sitting on the cold floor.
Only then did I let myself shatter.
The crying came in waves: great, ugly sobs that wracked my whole body and left me gasping for air. I cried for Millie, alone in her hospital bed, probably wondering where I'd gone. I cried for Nathaniel, whose face in that courtroom had looked like a man watching his house burn down. I cried for myself, for the private,tender parts of me that had been ripped out and displayed for public consumption.
Tendency to project maternal feelings onto employer-employee dynamics.
Pattern of becoming inappropriately attached to unavailable men.
History of choosing relationships that replicate early abandonment trauma.
Every word from that courtroom played on loop, a greatest hits album of my deepest shames. That lawyer hadn't just attacked my credibility. She'd performed an autopsy on my psyche while I was still breathing.
When the tears finally ran dry, I stayed on the floor, hollow and exhausted. My phone glowed periodically from where I'd dropped it. It was Eleanor, still trying, still worried. I couldn't face her yet. Couldn't bear to hear the sympathy in her voice.
I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the light through the windows to shift from gray to amber to the deep purple of evening. Long enough for my legs to go numb and my back to ache from pressing against the door.
My phone buzzed again, and I almost ignored it. But something, masochism, probably, or that anxious attachment the lawyer had so helpfully diagnosed, made me reach for it.
Not Eleanor this time.
Nathaniel Sterling.
My heart stopped. Then restarted at twice its normal speed.
I opened the message with trembling fingers.
Nathaniel
Claire. I am sorry. Those words are entirely inadequate, but they are all I have. What happened today was a profound failure on my part. I brought you into this mess, and you paid the price.
I read it twice, each word landing like a small, precise blow.
Three dots appeared. He was still typing.
Nathaniel
I've instructed Miles to transfer a severance package to your account since you refused the ‘seed’ cheque. Two years' salary. All professional obligations to my family are dissolved. You owe us nothing.
The air left my lungs.
Nathaniel
You deserve complete freedom from the world I dragged you into. I am deeply, deeply sorry.
