Lena
I was in the garden when Nate texted me.
Not a message. Just a link to the statement and a single line underneath: He went to bat for you.
I read the statement on my phone sitting among my mother's roses in the November cold with a blanket over my shoulders that Mrs. Billy had brought out without being asked.
I read it once.
Read it again.
There was a section, the part about my contribution to the gala, that had a quote from Nate that I was fairly certain I would need to sit with for a long time before I understood fully what it did to something in my chest. But it was the final line of the statement that I kept coming back to.
Not the legal precision of the anonymous source section.
Not the charity numbers.
One sentence in the middle of my section that wasn't a quote and was
