Not in a good way. Not in a "local teacher wins award" way. In a "woman publicly humiliated in custody battle" way, complete with unflattering courtroom screenshots and headlines that made me want to crawl under my bed and never emerge.
STERLING CUSTODY BATTLE: Tutor's Mental Health Records Exposed
"Unstable Gold-Digger" or Victim? The Claire Cross Question
Billionaire's Employee Breaks Down Under Cross-Examination
I hadn't broken down. I'd answered questions while my soul was being filleted. There's a difference. But apparently, "woman maintains composure while being eviscerated" doesn't generate clicks.
"Fantastic," I muttered to my ceiling. "Really love this for me— wait… did I say that before?"
Abraham Lincoln stared back, unimpressed. Even the water stain was judging me now.
My phone had seventeen new notifications. I couldn't look at them. Couldn't face the mixture of pity and morbid curiosity that would be waiting in my inbox. Instead, I lay there, staring at the ceiling, replaying Nathaniel's texts from the night before.
Nathaniel
All professional ties dissolved. You owe us nothing.
You deserve complete freedom.
Freedom. Right. I was so free I couldn't move.
The day crawled by in a haze of instant coffee and compulsive apartment cleaning. I scrubbed my bathroom until my hands were raw. I reorganized my bookshelf twice, once alphabetically, once by color, then back to alphabetical because the color system looked unhinged. I started applications for three teaching jobs I didn't want and closed my laptop before I could submit any of them.
My phone kept lighting up. Eleanor. Former colleagues. Numbers I didn't recognize, probably reporters who'd somehow gotten my contact information.
I ignored all of it.
But ignoring the world didn't stop my brain from circling the same obsessive loop: Millie was in the hospital. Millie had a serious head injury, a broken arm, and three cracked ribs. Millie was probably confused and scared, and wondering why the person who'd promised to be there had vanished.
I'd looked up pediatric head trauma recovery at 2 AM, because apparently I enjoyed torturing myself. The articles said children with moderate concussions needed calm, familiar faces. Minimal stress. Consistent reassurance.
Instead, Millie had a father drowning in a legal war and a stepmother who'd nearly killed her.
And me? I was scrubbing grout and pretending I didn't exist.
By the second morning, the guilt had become a physical weight on my chest.
"This is pathetic," I said to myself. "I'm hiding in my apartment while a seven-year-old wonders where I went. What kind of person does that?"
The kind who got publicly humiliated and is trying to survive,a reasonable voice answered.
The kind who abandons people when things get hard,my mother's voice countered.Just like me.
That one hit home.
I grabbed my phone before I could talk myself out of it and called Eleanor.
She answered on the first ring. "Claire. Thank God."
"I know, I'm sorry, I should have called sooner?—"
"Stop apologizing and tell me you're okay."
"I'm..." I looked around my obsessively clean apartment, at the dark circles under my eyes in the hallway mirror, at the hollowed-out shell of a person I'd become in forty-eight hours. "I'm not okay. I'm really, really not okay."
"I'm coming over."
