The Royal We (28 page)

Nick’s phone buzzed. I stood to leave, but he held up a finger before answering.

“Cer, can you hang on a tick? Thanks. I’ll just be a sec.” He pushed mute. “I’m glad we talked,” he said to me.

“I am, too.” I meant it.

“Do we hug good-bye?”

“Better not,” I said.

“Right,” he said, rubbing his phone with his thumb.

As I rounded the corner and crept down the stairs, I heard him take Ceres off hold.

“Thanks, I just needed to fix my ice pack,” he fibbed, his voice fainter as I got farther away. “Oh, just a bit puffy. I’m told it will be character-building…”

Joss’s now-empty flat was dark and stuffy and, but for Cilla’s bra swinging from a drawer pull in the kitchen, devoid of life. The clock said it was just gone eleven thirty a.m. but it felt like eleven at night. I wanted to talk to Lacey. I wanted to apologize to Dad. I wanted to take a shower. But most of all, I wanted to celebrate. I had seen Nick without bursting into tears, or flames, and as Joss’s front door clicked shut behind me, I knew, at last, that when I slept I would wake up to some kind of fresh start.

F
our losses in a row, Bex. Twelve total and April isn’t even near over.” Dad’s large, stubbly face filled the screen as he took off his battered ball cap and ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “The Cubs are going to be the death of me.”

“Chin up, Dad,” I said, yawning. “Literally. I can only see half your face.”

It was a new baseball season, and Dad and I were picking one Cubs game each week and video chatting right after, when, as he put it, the agony or ecstasy was still fresh. I had woken up before dawn for today’s rant, and although we were both bleary and bummed, I wouldn’t have missed it. I’d spent too long being defensive and evasive with my parents because I was secretly upset with myself. It’s the cruelest coincidence that the meeting with Nick that I’d so dreaded turned out to be the exact thing I needed to pull myself together, and I still catch myself wondering what might have happened if I’d reached out to Nick sooner, or at least said hello. But I always come back to the fact that running away was a necessary act of cowardice, begetting a necessary act of stupidity. I needed to hit rock bottom; I needed bleary regret.

Half of Mom suddenly ducked into the video frame. “Good night, Rebecca,” she shouted, as if she had to carry her voice across the ocean.

“It’s only good night for
you
,” I said. “I still have to go to work.”

She clucked. “The things you do for that team.”

“It’s the truest love there is,” Dad intoned. “Well, except for one.”

“Thank you, Earl,” she said, right as Dad and I said in unison, “Cracker Jack.”

“Oh, well, that’s lovely. See if I make you my famous beef Wellington again,” she huffed, as Dad pulled her onto his lap. “It was highly lauded by Hardware Pete and his wife. We had them over for dinner yesterday, Bex.
Much
nicer than Auto Sal from Sal’s Auto.”

She lovingly touched her screen, where I think my cheek must have been. “You do look so much better, sweetie. Happier. Or at least more solid.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I mean it. I know I was tough to take for a while there.”

“You want tough, try Mrs. Auto Sal’s brisket,” Mom said.

I smiled as she prattled on about the offending meat. I did feel more solid. The first step in my recovery, not unlike what we used to do before going out and getting blitzed, had been establishing a solid base. I skulked into the Soane museum, apologized for my spotty attendance, and promised my boss, Maud, that I’d fired Jack Daniel’s as my therapist. Maud is an extremely nice fortyish woman who is also a bit of a blank canvas—her hair is neither blond nor brown, yet also both; her features and wardrobe are plain, her thick hose as neutral as possible, and she and her mid-height, mid-weight boyfriend seem to eat only at mid-priced chains—and I think she was tickled that I confided in her, confidentiality agreements notwithstanding. I paid back her milky tea and sympathy by throwing myself into my job, the most successful product of which was convincing the Soane to turn an unused basement space into an art studio for at-risk children. We named it Paint Britain, and watching the kids revel in it inspired me to go back to my own art classes. And it was there that I met the first guy of about eight that I would date in the ensuing months—proper guys, employed, called when they said they would, stood when I got up from the table, remembered every detail a well-bred boyfriend ought. The one hitch was that I couldn’t make out with any of them without feeling like my heart was stuck in my windpipe. Another stage of my
Irresponsible Ladies’ Home Journal
Guide to Healing was supposed to be recalibrating via harmless romps—or, per the old adage, getting over someone by getting under someone else—but after my two-day tryst with the actor in Cannes, I’d lain awake worried that Nick had spoiled me on casual sex, because I couldn’t stop making comparisons to him. And yet I wasn’t ready for anything deeper; I had to hope someday I would be.

I focused in on my parents again as my mother was launching into an explanation of the origins of beef Wellington, and something caught my eye.

“Mom, what are you wearing?”

“Oh, this?” Mom fluffed the collar of her robe. “I’d gotten accustomed to the ones at The Dorch, so I bought one and personalized it, and now I have a piece of London here at home.”

“Does it say
Lady Porter
?”

“Damn right,” Dad said, nuzzling Mom’s arm. “I
am
an Earl, after all.”

“You two crazy kids,” I said. “I have to go. I haven’t had enough caffeine yet to watch my parents get all gross with each other.”

“When will we see you again?” Dad asked.

“Next week, right? The Pirates are going to murder us tonight, and then the Reds…ugh.”

“No, I mean, in person,” he said. “Come for a game!”

Iowa still bore the taint of my post-breakup trip, so I’d avoided it, including convincing my parents to spend last Christmas in England (I know they saw through me, but luckily, they were totally on board). I did pine for that crack-of-dawn pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, though, wandering around Chicago in a daze to kill time before the game, then guzzling stadium food and sodas to fuel the five-hour ride home—as if our electric indignance about their performance, win or lose, wasn’t enough. I missed that ritual.

“It’s a date,” I said. “Now go to sleep.”

“Will you be watching Nicholas tonight?” Mom asked.

“Honey, maybe she doesn’t want to talk about icholas-Nay,” Dad said, nudging her.

“I do speak pig Latin, Dad,” I said. “And it’s fine. I promise. Lacey and I are going to watch it together.”

“He’s a very nice young man,” Dad said. “I’m sure he’ll do great.”

“Earl!” Mom rapped his hat brim.

“What? He can be nice and still undeserving of our beloved firstborn,” he said.

“Good night, guys. I love you,” I said, laughing as I closed my laptop.

Nick hadn’t taken much of a beating, pun intended, for his fisticuffs with Gaz. Their cover had either worked, or Mustache’s colleagues played along with the party line to avoid a blacklisting, and the public forgot about the set-to as soon as something more interesting happened—like Prince Edwin’s wife Elizabeth delivering a “premature” baby boy seven-ish months after the wedding, whose weight miraculously reached nine pounds by the time he equally miraculously went home three days later. So on the occasion of Freddie’s twenty-fifth birthday, instead of a party the likes of which had been thrown for Nick—if this bothered Freddie, he never said—the boys had agreed to a rare joint appearance on the BBC. Beyond the surface PR objective of showing them grown-up and diligently serving Britain, this interview had a slew of ulterior motives: to remind the public it was rather fond of Nick even if his decision-making was not unimpeachable, and to distract everyone from analyzing Elizabeth’s pregnancy timeline.

Lacey had moved to her own place in South Kensington—she claimed having a roommate cramped her personal life—and because I passed out at geriatric hours these days, I only ever saw her on weekends, if she wasn’t out with Freddie or a shiny new guy. But we’d both agreed that this weeknight special with the Brothers Wales deserved its own private viewing party, bolstered with port wine and a ripe Stilton. While we waited for it to start, she dove into my pile of newspapers.

“Not
one
report from that film festival in Brixton last night,” she complained.

“Since when are you a fan of…what was it? ‘Gritty Hungarian noir cinema’?” I asked.

“Obviously I don’t care about that,” she said. “But Philip emceed it, and he brought me, and I wore the best green dress. I even gave Clive a heads-up, but nothing.”

Interest in the Ivy League had waned once I stopped making a spectacle of myself, and it hadn’t escaped me that Lacey’s subsequent social choices had the warmth of the spotlight in common. She’d dallied with a lawyer named Maxwell, son of Baron Something-Something; an up-and-coming celebrity chef named Dev; and a footballer who’d immediately fallen off his game, and thus broke up with her before his debut with the Dutch national team. She was now seeing both Penelope Six-Names’s cohost, Philip Frogge-Whitworth (it was a hyphenpalooza on
Morning Zoo
) and some DJ I could never remember. I didn’t know how she had the energy.

Before I came up with anything ego-soothing to say, a graphic on the TV screen coalesced into the words
On Heir with Katie Kenneth
. Lacey plonked a massive slice of cheese onto a cracker.

“Do you think they’ll be in suits, or their uniforms?”

“Suits,” I said. “The uniforms are too obvious.”

“I bet you a cocktail it’s uniforms,” she said. “For the full impact.”

We were both right: The hour-long special opened with Freddie and Nick on the job—Lacey sighed audibly when Freddie landed a rescue copter with extreme panache, although I privately thought shooting finger guns at the camera was a bit much—before transitioning into a sit-down interview in which they wore elegant but not ostentatious jackets and ties. Nick was in high spirits (when asked why he hadn’t pursued being a pilot, he cracked, “I can’t fly with a peg leg”) and Freddie was, well, Freddie.

“Think of me as the court jester,” he’d said with a twinkle, when asked about his bad-boy image. “Nick and my father have a heavy responsibility in their futures, and they handle it with care. My job is to get into enough trouble for both of them, to balance the ledger.”

“He makes out like he’s such a gigolo,” Lacey said, crunching through another cracker.

“That’s because he
is
,” I said.

“Sure, but he’ll come around,” she said. “I think he wants more than just some flavor of the month. Their phones stop ringing eventually. Mine hasn’t.”

I turned to look at her, but she studiously did not meet my gaze.

On TV, the fiftysomething Katie Kenneth asked Nick about Emma—he’d lied, with that long-practiced façade of calm, that she was helping them choose charities for their patronage—before segueing into a line of questioning that I was surprised had been approved.

“You’ve been linked with Gemma Sands, Ceres Whitehall de Villency, and even American Rebecca Porter,” Katie said, frowning as if this were as vital as a conversation about genocide. “We’re all hungering for a royal wedding. Are you game?”

“Ugh,” I said to the TV.

But Nick simply laughed charmingly. “Are you proposing to me, Katie?”

“Please. Everyone knows I’m the real catch,” Freddie said.

“You know I don’t usually comment on this,” Nick said pleasantly. “But I will say that I can’t simply decide I want a wedding and plug in the first bride that appears. I take my military duties seriously. I take my royal duties seriously. And I take commitment to another person seriously, as she’d be my partner for life and beside me at the helm of the country someday. I want to make the right choice, and that cannot be rushed.”

“That was well done,” Lacey said.

“Beats ‘ask me in a decade.’” I couldn’t pretend that didn’t still sting.

“And I know it’s tempting to speculate, and to track and trace the movements of the women who are important to me,” Nick continued. “But I would like to ask the public and the press to show them some mercy. I accept what comes with my birthright for myself, but I don’t have to accept it for them. I cannot brook with a person being made to feel unsafe simply for having cared about me.”

As he looked full into the camera at the end, I swear I felt his eyes on me, and in a flash, mine were wet.

“He’s a class act, that one,” Lacey said, then heaved a comical sigh. “I wish he would have given them the all-clear to hound
me
, though. I have much cuter clothes than I used to, and, like, hi, give some love to a girl who puts on heels to go to Tesco.”

She stood and brushed cracker crumbs onto my carpet. “Come on, we officially owe each other a drink.”

I shook my head. “I have an early staff meeting tomorrow. And I still don’t think I’m fully detoxed from the first year of being single.”

Lacey eyed me suspiciously. “You never did tell me what made you decide to dry out.”

Our psychic twin abilities had dissipated a bit lately, but she still knew I was withholding something, and she didn’t like it. But Paris was too dangerously juicy. Clive and I had only even discussed it to reassert that we would never discuss it. I certainly didn’t want to relive it, and he needed to keep Davinia loyal, given that her entire life was one long roster of connections he still hoped to leverage for his own column at the
Recorder
(although so far he’d produced only biased profiles, buried in the middle of the paper, of her father’s rich friends and their self-indulgent charity efforts, like a benefit for something called the British Association for the Proliferation of Philanthropic Events—M. C. Escher fecklessly reinterpreted). No, the truth of Paris was nonnegotiable, even with Lacey. Maybe especially with her. Because I couldn’t swear she wouldn’t whisper it to Freddie, and that was like telling the town crier.

“My liver begged for mercy,” I said instead. It was close enough.

“Very funny,” Lacey said. “You’re going to waste your prime years if you don’t get back on the party horse at least a little. Come on. For me? For the Ivy League?”

“Lace, he just asked the press to lay off,” I said. “I will look like a total jackass if I run right out and tempt them into a chase.”

Lacey fell back against the couch cushions and crossed her arms over her chest. “I miss my partner in crime,” she said petulantly. “We don’t live together and now we don’t have much of a
life
together, either.”

I reached out and poked her with my big toe.

“Get that thing off me,” she said. So I poked again. “Ew, I’m serious, Bex, you know I hate feet.”

But she was laughing, and so was I.

“We can go out next weekend, I promise,” I said, wiggling a cheese-topped cracker in her face, another button I knew I could push.

“Okay,” she said, but I could tell she was still smarting. “You win. But only for tonight.”

To look at the area around Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public square in London, you’d think you’d stumbled upon a residential neighborhood—which, in fact, it used to be. The three- and four-story brick or stone buildings once housed a variety of highborn folk who must have had a real thrill in 1683 when a would-be assassin of King Charles II was beheaded there. Maybe watching a public murder during afternoon tea is why they all moved west and gave up their real estate to the business world. Queen Eleanor’s lawyers have an office there, as does the Royal College of Surgeons, and at numbers twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, there’s Sir John Soane’s Museum, my professional home and my refuge.