“Nick and I have a ton of experience in all those things, so call anytime,” I said.
“This was nice, wasn’t it?” she asked hopefully. “I could get used to this. It felt so…natural. Do you think…” She bit her lip and looked over her shoulder at Freddie, abject longing on her face. “Do you think he enjoyed it, too?”
I knew what she wanted me to tell her. As I looked into the happy face of this woman who’d cut herself off from the world for so long and was starting to find a way back in, I couldn’t imagine dashing her dreams by telling her what I really thought—but I couldn’t stomach lying to her, either.
“We all had a blast,” I hedged, with sincerity.
“Daph,” Freddie called out, the effects of the drink audible. “Your bubbly’s going to lose its fizz.”
She threw her arms around me again and then pulled away and went to him. They clinked glasses, and as he sipped, Daphne turned and raised hers at me with wide, excited eyes, in clear anticipation of something I wasn’t sure she’d get. Then she took his hand and they disappeared onto the balcony, alone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lifting up my shirt, I stared down at my stomach, which had puffed up enough that it spilled over the waistband of my jeans.
“Hello, friend,” I said, patting it. “Your day is about to get a bit worse.”
Then I pinched the flesh and jabbed the needle straight into it.
I’d gotten good at giving myself this fertility drug, which was a hormone cocktail designed to help my body cook up some extra eggs. I kept it in the mini-fridge in our upstairs sitting room, and every day I’d load my dosage into the pen, screw on the slim, short needle, and shoot myself up—sometimes on its own, and sometimes mixed with another drug meant to make sure my body didn’t decide to release any precious eggs ahead of schedule.
“How are you with needles?” had been the first question from my no-nonsense fertility specialist, a fortysomething woman with the thickest, glossiest black hair I’d ever seen.
“I mean, how is anyone with them?” I asked.
“That’s fair,” she had replied. “But if you’re serious about this, you’ll get good with them. Trust me.”
I’d doubted her very much, and planned to make Nick do it. But then the nurse had demonstrated the injection for me, and it was a benign little pinprick. In two days’ time I could poke myself without a flinch, and the only trick was finding a spot that hadn’t already bloomed into a little bruise. Sometimes, like today, I even managed without drawing blood.
“Well done,” I told my stomach, peeling the backing from a bandage and putting it on the minute puncture mark.
During the months we’d tried Clomid, it had done nothing but bloat me, to the excitement and then consternation of a public who noticed the puff and assumed it meant an announcement was forthcoming. So we jettisoned the Queen’s gynecologist for Dr. Shirin Akhtar, a specialist who’d listened to me patiently and started me on an artificial-insemination cycle right around the holidays. This had meant not only smuggling fertility meds in a cooler to Sandringham, but excusing myself briefly from the Christmas Eve meal to take the timed shot that released all my pent-up eggs. Eleanor had not been pleased—you do not leave the table before the Queen, even if your bladder is about to rupture—but I wasn’t about to blow the timing of this cycle for decorum, so I’d feigned a blinding migraine.
The meds had produced a decent amount of eggs. I felt their weight. I felt optimistic. All those little would-be babies floating around in there. But then thirty-six hours later, as I lay in the stirrups, Dr. Akhtar had come to me with her syringe full of Nick’s genetic material, looked very kindly at me as she lifted the sheet, and said what every woman wants to hear when she’s about to get a much-anticipated shot of sperm.
“Just so you know, this probably won’t work,” she said, pressing the plunger on the syringe. “His sample is not what we’d hoped. Time to bring out bigger guns.”
Our first round of IVF, my eggs had winnowed down to only two viable embryos, neither of which took. Now we were on round two, and it was harder to hide the effects of the hormones: a zit here, more pudge there. I tried not to mind, because the side effects were all in aid of the big prize, and the robust public speculation was at least rooted in warm feelings. Well, other than those from Clive, who that morning had released an opus headlined BABY FEVER OR BABY NEVER? in which he alleged I was intentionally gaining weight to gin up speculation—and thus our popularity—but had no intention of ever having a baby because I was too vain to risk my figure long-term.
“Even the headline is annoying,” I’d grumbled. “It only looks like it rhymes.”
“Clive is nothing if not annoying,” Bea agreed. “In the absence of real reporting, he’s taking potshots. That’s never good for one’s longevity.”
“I thought potshots were the bread and butter of the British press.”
Bea shrugged. “The difference is that most of them have earned their stripes,” she said. “Clive engineered one outstanding scoop, but now what? He has no real sources and no experience to know how to find them. Take your shots and you’ll be pregnant soon enough to shut him up.”
“Thanks, Dr. Bea,” I said. “I hope you’re right.”
“I’m always right.” Bea folded her hands. “Now. How are you otherwise? House doing okay? Married life satisfactory? Nick and Freddie still getting along?”
I blinked. “What is this? Do you have a small-talk checklist?”
“Marj kept it all business, and look where it got everyone,” Bea said, somewhat callously. She clicked her tongue. “Is Freddie behaving himself, or should I prepare for another round of Daphne rumors?”
A patron at the Starbucks across from Daphne’s hotel had spied Freddie leaving the morning
