Updated Feb 23, 2026 • ~16 min read
POV: Valencia
The press doesn’t sleep.
They’ve been camped outside the building for two days now — a restless, hungry mass of cameras and microphones and satellite vans that stretch halfway down the block. Valencia learned this the hard way when she made the mistake of standing too close to the window, and a telephoto lens caught her profile through the glass, and by morning her face was on three different websites under headlines she still can’t bring herself to read all the way through.
She doesn’t go near the windows anymore.
The penthouse has never felt smaller. For all its floor-to-ceiling glass and carefully curated open space, it presses in on her now — the silences between rooms too loud, the light coming through the blinds too sharp, everything feeling borrowed and provisional in a way it hadn’t before. She’d started to think of this place as home. That was the mistake. That was what she’d let herself believe.
The shouted questions drift up even on the fortieth floor.
“Valencia! Is it true you were paid to date Dominic St. Clair?”
“How much money did you make from the fake relationship?”
“Were you sleeping with him for financial gain?”
She presses her back against the wall beside the window and squeezes her eyes shut. Parasites — that’s the only word for it. People who build their living out of other people’s worst moments, who photograph grief and bottle up scandal and sell it for ad revenue. She wants to feel righteous anger at them, and she does, but underneath it is something uglier: shame. Because the questions aren’t entirely wrong. The relationship did start as a performance. The money did change hands. And now it doesn’t matter that everything became real, that she fell in love with him slowly and helplessly and against every better instinct she had — because the story has already been written, and it’s not her story.
Her phone won’t stop ringing.
Her mother has called six times. Her father twice. College friends who haven’t spoken to her in months suddenly flooding her inbox, asking if the rumors are true with a kind of gleeful urgency that makes her stomach turn. Former employers — one childcare agency, one tutoring center — reaching out to “clarify the situation,” their discomfort obvious through the polite phrasing. Everyone assuming. Everyone judging. Everyone arriving at their conclusions before she’s even had a chance to speak.
She silences the phone and sets it face-down on the kitchen counter and stands there breathing for a moment.
When Maria finally gets through, Valencia almost doesn’t answer. But it’s Maria, and Maria is the one person in her life who has never made her feel like she needs to explain herself.
“V.” Maria’s voice is careful, warm. “Talk to me. Are you okay?”
“No.” There’s no point pretending. “I’m not okay. My family thinks I’m a prostitute. Half of society thinks I’m a gold-digger. The press has turned my relationship into a scandal and they won’t stop — they won’t stop calling, won’t stop photographing, won’t—”
She has to stop. Breathe.
“But you and Dominic are really together, right?” Maria asks. “It’s not fake anymore?”
“It’s real now. It’s been real for a long time. But we started with a lie, and that’s all anyone cares about. Not what it became. Just what it was in the beginning. The lie is cleaner. The lie makes a better headline.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Valencia looks around the penthouse — at the clean lines of the furniture, the gray morning light filtering through the blinds she’s been keeping drawn, the vase of fresh flowers that appeared two days ago as if by magic, as if Dominic could maintain the appearance of normalcy by sheer force of will. She thinks about the word she used just now without thinking. Home. She’d started calling it that.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t stay here. I can’t face this.”
“Then leave. Come to Brooklyn. Stay with me.”
“And abandon Jules? Abandon Dominic?”
“V.” Maria’s voice is gentle but firm. “You need to protect yourself first. You can’t help them if you’re already destroyed.”
She’s crying before she realizes it — not the ugly, gasping kind, just tears running down her face while she stands in a kitchen that costs more than her parents’ house and feels completely, bewilderingly alone.
Because Maria is right. That’s the thing about Maria. She is almost always right, in that quiet, practical way of hers, and Valencia hates it sometimes.
“I’ll think about it,” Valencia says.
But she already knows.
She’s leaving.
Dominic tries damage control. He issues a statement within hours of the first wave of headlines — she watches him dictate it to his publicist through the half-open door of his office, his voice careful and measured and giving nothing away: “Valencia Rivera and I began our relationship under unconventional circumstances, but our feelings are genuine. We are truly in love. The characterization of her as someone acting in bad faith is false and deeply offensive.”
The press doesn’t care.
They run with the scandal anyway. More articles, more speculation, more photographs dug up from events she’d attended on his arm, re-examined now under a different light. The headlines keep coming, each one worse than the last.
“Gold-Digger Nanny: Inside the Fake Romance.”
“Billionaire’s Shame: How She Fooled Him.”
“From Employee to Girlfriend: The Nanny’s Scheme.”
She stops reading them. She has to.
Her mother calls that evening while Valencia is sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor, not packing yet but thinking about it. Her mother’s voice is different than it usually is — higher, more strained, with the particular quality it gets when she is trying not to cry in front of someone and not quite managing.
“Anak. Come home. To the Philippines. This man, this scandal — it is not worth it.”
“Mama, I love him—”
“Love doesn’t matter if it destroys your reputation!” The composure breaks, just briefly. “Your family’s reputation. People here, in the neighborhood — they are asking me if my daughter is a—” She can’t finish it. She doesn’t have to. “Come home. Now. You quit that job. You come home. You leave this mess behind.”
“I can’t just leave—”
“Yes, you can. You always could. Come home, Valencia.”
After the call ends, Valencia sits for a long time without moving. The bedroom is quiet. Somewhere down the hall, she can hear Jules talking to himself while he plays — a low, continuous narration that he does when he’s absorbed in something, a sound she has come to love in a way she can’t fully articulate. The sound of a child who learned to use his voice again. The sound of healing, of small daily miracles.
She closes her eyes and sits with it.
Her mother’s right. That’s the part she can’t get away from. This world is not hers. She’d felt it from the first day she stepped into this penthouse — had pushed the feeling down, told herself it didn’t matter, told herself love was enough to bridge any distance. But the distance was never just about money or class or the way people looked at them at charity galas. It was about belonging. And she’d been a fool, a genuine, well-meaning, heart-wide-open fool, to think she could outrun that.
A working-class Filipina nanny in love with a French-American billionaire. Society was always going to have opinions. His mother was always going to disapprove. The press was always going to find an angle. She’d been naive enough to think that if the love was real, none of those things would matter.
She starts packing.
She’s halfway through her second bag when Dominic appears in the doorway. He takes in the open suitcase, the folded clothes on the bed, and something in his expression shifts — a careful blankness that she recognizes as the thing he does when he’s trying not to show how much something costs him.
“What are you doing?”
She doesn’t look up. If she looks up, she’ll lose her nerve. “What I should have done when your mother first threatened me. Leaving.”
“Valencia—”
“I can’t do this.” She keeps folding. Keeps moving. “Can’t face the press, can’t handle my family’s shame, can’t be the scandal that follows you forever. That follows us forever. You deserve better than that. Jules deserves better.”
“This will blow over. Scandals always—”
“Not for me!” The composure she’s been holding cracks. “I’m not a billionaire who can throw money at problems until they disappear. I’m a working-class woman whose reputation is everything in my community — my family’s community — and right now my reputation is destroyed. My mother can’t walk to the market without someone asking about her daughter. Do you understand what that means to her? Do you understand what I’ve done to her?”
“I’ll fix it—”
“You can’t fix this. Your mother made sure of that. She went to the press specifically to ruin me, and she succeeded. There is no statement that undoes what those headlines did.”
Dominic crosses the room. He’s close now, close enough that she can see the exhaustion behind his eyes, the three days of fractured sleep written on his face. He runs his hands through his hair in that gesture she knows — the one he does when he’s out of moves, when he can’t see the solution.
“Please. Don’t leave. We can get through this together—”
“Can we? How?” She faces him now because she has to, because she owes him that much. “Your mother will never genuinely accept me. Society already has its story. My family is ashamed. Tell me what that future looks like, Dominic. Tell me the shape of it. Because I can’t see it.”
“We have love—”
“Love isn’t enough.” Her voice breaks on it. “I need dignity. I need to be able to look my mother in the eye. I need to not be followed by cameras outside every building I enter. I need my name to not be a punchline. Love is real and it’s beautiful and it’s not enough to make any of that go away.”
“So you’re giving up. On me. On Jules. On us.”
“I’m saving what’s left of myself. Before this completely destroys me.”
She zips the first bag. Her hands are shaking.
Everything she owns fits in two suitcases — she’d known that coming in, and she knows it now, and there’s something terrible about how little evidence there is of a life, of a year, of falling in love. She came here with nothing and she’s leaving with nothing and the fact that she can reduce herself to two bags and call that a life feels like the cruelest kind of evidence that she was right all along. She didn’t belong here.
“Valencia, please—”
A voice from the doorway.
Small. Uncertain. “Val?”
They both turn.
Jules stands in the hallway in his dinosaur pajamas, the stuffed elephant clutched against his chest, his dark eyes moving between them with the watchful, careful attention of a child who has learned to read rooms for danger. He shouldn’t be awake. He’s been up too late as it is, unsettled by the change in the apartment’s atmosphere over the past three days, by the way the adults in his life have been speaking in careful voices and not quite looking at each other.
“Jules, buddy, you should be in bed—” Dominic starts.
But Jules is looking at Valencia. Just Valencia. Looking at the suitcase. Looking at her face.
“Are you leaving?”
She kneels down so she’s at his level. “Sweetheart—”
“Please don’t leave.” His voice is very small and very certain at the same time. “I’ll be better. I’ll be so good. Whatever I did wrong, I’ll fix it. Just don’t go.”
Her heart breaks. Quietly, completely, the way things break when they’re already stretched too thin. “Baby, this isn’t about you. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re perfect. I love you so much.”
“Then why are you leaving?”
“Because sometimes grown-ups have to make choices that are hard and complicated—”
“That’s what you said when Mom died.” Jules’s voice is very quiet. Very still. “That it was hard and complicated and she had to go. But you’re not dead. You’re here. You can stay. You’re choosing not to stay.”
No one speaks for a moment.
The accuracy of it — the brutal, uncomplicated accuracy of a child who has not yet learned to dress things up — hangs in the air of the room. Valencia can feel Dominic behind her, can feel him going still the same way she’s gone still.
Then Jules moves. He crosses the room in three quick steps and wraps his arms around her waist and holds on, his face pressed into her middle, his small body rigid with the effort of it.
“Please, Val. Please don’t leave me. I need you. Daddy needs you. We’re a family.”
“Jules—”
“Don’t you love us?”
“Of course I love you. Of course I do—”
“Then stay. Love means staying. Mom left because she died, and that wasn’t her choice. But you’re choosing to leave.” He looks up at her, and his eyes are wet, and he looks so much younger than six and so much older than six at the same time. “That’s worse. Because you could choose different.”
Out of the mouths of children.
Valencia gently, carefully, extracts herself from his grip. She kisses his forehead — lingers there for a moment, breathing him in, committing it to memory in a way she doesn’t fully let herself acknowledge because she can’t. She straightens up and she doesn’t look at Dominic.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I love you more than I know how to say. But I have to take care of myself right now. That’s not something you did wrong. That’s not about you.”
Jules turns to his father. “Daddy. Fix it. Make her stay.”
Dominic kneels beside him and pulls him close, one arm around his son’s small shoulders. When he looks up at Valencia, his eyes are bright and his jaw is set and he looks like a man holding himself together by pure will. “I can’t make her do anything, Jules. Val has to make her own choices.”
“Then choose us!” Jules turns back to Valencia, and his voice has gone ragged the way children’s voices do when they’ve run out of arguments and only desperation is left. “Choose us! Please!”
Valencia picks up her suitcases.
She doesn’t look back.
She knows, with complete and terrible certainty, that if she looks at either of them right now she will stay. She will put the bags down and stay and it will destroy her slowly instead of quickly, and in the end there will be nothing left of her to give them anyway. That’s what she tells herself. She tells herself it as she walks down the hall, as she hears Jules begin to cry — not the controlled, careful crying she heard from him in the early days, but the open, unguarded sobbing of a child who has lost something twice — and she tells herself it as she hears Dominic’s voice behind her, low and broken, trying to comfort his son.
She presses the elevator button.
The doors open. That particular, neutral elevator light — so different from the warm lamps of the penthouse behind her. The last chance to turn around. She can feel it the same way you feel the last moment before a door closes, something in the air shifting, the future bifurcating into two different lives.
Her mother’s voice: “Come home. This isn’t worth your dignity.”
The press outside, every morning: “Gold-digger.”
The shape of every headline: “The help who got ideas above her station.”
She steps in.
The doors close, and Jules’s crying cuts off, and Dominic’s devastation cuts off, and the family she built piece by piece over a year cuts off, and she is alone in a small metal box descending forty floors to the lobby.
She takes the service entrance. She’d thought of it earlier, working out the logistics with the awful practicality of a person who knows she’s going to do something difficult. The press doesn’t cover service entrances. She walks through a narrow corridor that smells like concrete and cleaning products and emerges into an alley, and flags a cab on the next street over, and gives Maria’s Brooklyn address, and does not look back through the rear window as the cab pulls away.
She can’t.
She turns off her phone when Dominic’s text comes through — she sees the preview before she does it, just those first few words: Please come back. I love you. She turns it off before she can read the rest. She can’t hold his pain and her own at the same time. She doesn’t have room.
The cab crosses the bridge and the skyline recedes behind her, all those lit windows in all those towers that belong to people who have the luxury of belonging, and Valencia sits in the backseat with her two suitcases wedged beside her and watches it go.
She left the penthouse.
She left Dominic.
She left Jules.
She left the family that had become the truest thing in her life, and she did it for her dignity, for her mother’s pride, for the version of herself that existed before she walked into that interview and everything changed. She did it for self-preservation. She tells herself that, over and over, in the same rhythm as the bridge’s expansion joints passing under the tires.
She’s not sure it’s true.
Maria opens the door before Valencia has finished knocking. She takes one look at Valencia’s face — at the two suitcases, at the red eyes, at the very specific hollowness of a person who has just done something irrevocable — and pulls her inside without a word.
“Oh, V. Come here.”
Valencia breaks completely. She didn’t let herself cry in the elevator, or in the alley, or in the cab — she’d needed to hold it together long enough to get here, and now she’s here, and Maria’s arms are around her, and there’s nothing left to hold.
“I left them,” she says, when she can speak. “I left Jules and Dominic and I don’t know — I don’t know if I did the right thing. But I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t.”
“Shh.” Maria’s hand moves in slow circles on her back. “You did what you needed to do. You protected yourself. That’s not wrong.”
“Then why does it feel like I just destroyed everything good in my life?”
Maria doesn’t have an answer to that, and she’s wise enough not to invent one. She just holds Valencia while she cries, in the small, warm, cluttered Brooklyn apartment that feels nothing at all like home, while Valencia grieves the life she left behind and waits, in vain, for the grief to tell her she did the right thing.
Her heart keeps screaming that she made a terrible mistake.
She doesn’t know yet who to believe.
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