Claire's POV
The statement went viral by seven p.m.
Not the article — the statement. Alexandre's four sentences, published at five-forty-three on a Monday afternoon, had done something the article hadn't anticipated and the communications team hadn't predicted and I, sitting at my kitchen table at seven p.m. with Theo eating pasta beside me and my phone face down because I had made a decision not to look at it during dinner, had not been prepared for.
People liked it.
Not everyone. Not the financial press, who were still running the original framing with careful neutrality. Not the gossip columns, who had found a photograph of me from somewhere — outside the nursery gate, I thought, taken without my knowledge at some point in the last five weeks — and were running it alongside the arti
