So that was great.
“What an unbelievable likeness you’ve created,” I said, kissing the artist’s furry cheeks as he looked excessively pleased with himself.
“It would be impossible to hold a candle to the real thing,” the artist said, clasping my hand.
“Could you ever have imagined?” fussed British Tim Gunn anxiously.
“I…cannot believe it’s real,” I replied carefully.
Nick put a hand on my shoulder and shook the artist’s with his other one. “You’ve done some incredible work,” he said. “This painting will truly go down in history.”
For five more minutes we made small talk under the gaze of my ghoulish avatar, its monstrousness infecting my inner monologue until I felt equal to it. We said our farewells, piled back into the car, and were silent all the way back to the palace.
As soon as our red-painted front door closed behind us, I grabbed at my skull. “It’s a Horcrux,” I shrieked.
Nick’s lips twitched. “Whatever do you mean?”
“I’m Voldemort, and that thing is a dark, rotting piece of my soul. The longer we stood next to it, the meaner I was to that man inside my head,” I said, kicking off my heels.
“I thought it was beautiful.”
I gaped at him. “You did?”
“Yes,” he insisted. “I can’t believe you’re telling me you didn’t like it. It’s marvelous.”
“It’s an abomination and it’s going to hang there forever.”
“He really nailed your eyes,” Nick continued. “When I looked at it, it was like falling in love with you all over aga— Ow, that hurts, what is in your handbag?”
“My phone,” I said, thwacking him again for good measure. “I don’t want to miss Dr. Akhtar’s call. You are torturing me and I can see right through it, Your Royal Highness.”
Nick chortled. “Guilty,” he said. “But I do love it. Is that wrong? It’s so funny.”
“Funny to you, who looks super handsome in the one where you and Freddie are in your uniforms,” I said. “Less funny to me, the Troll Phantom of the Palace Bog.”
Nick picked up my hand and kissed it. “Perhaps it can be ‘out for cleaning’ quite a bit, then.”
I nodded. “Yes. Good. Let’s make that happen.”
“And when it is,” he said, “I’ll have them send it over to hang in the loo.”
I whacked him again with my purse. As if in response, my bag began to vibrate. It was the clinic. My nerves made me feel as if someone had reached into my body and was holding my ribs in a vise. I held up crossed fingers to Nick as I answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Bex,” Dr. Akhtar said. “I’m so sorry…”
I didn’t have to tell Nick anything. He saw it all play out on my face as there, in the foyer, I started to cry.
* * *
It didn’t improve from there. As spring rolled into summer, I started to feel like a human pincushion. Nick and I didn’t even log the passage of time in months anymore; our mile markers were now shots, procedures, waiting times, and disappointments. We had pushed so hard, starting every new cycle as soon as we could once my body reset from the last, and every time, my efforts yielded double-digit eggs but not enough quality fertilized embryos to freeze for later. And none taking up residence in my womb.
“We know implantation is not impossible,” Dr. Akhtar said to me during one of my checkups. “But I’m not seeing the results I’d like, and I think…” She cleared her throat. “Have you considered outside help?”
I’d blinked. “Another specialist?”
She shook her head. “Another sperm sample,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “No. I don’t think so. It’s not at that point yet, right? It hasn’t been that long.”
“Nicholas’s numbers aren’t where I’d like them to be, and sperm donation can have very successful results in—”
“No,” I said firmly. “We’ve got this. We’re a team. It’ll work out.”
Dr. Akhtar looked at me skeptically. The truth was that I couldn’t bring myself to make Nick feel as cruddy and self-defeating about this as I already did. Not yet. It felt too early to ring that alarm, not without turning over any other stones, so I crossed my fingers and we made her prescribed lifestyle changes to improve Nick’s samples. He took aspartic acid and vitamin C. He exercised more and stopped watching TV or looking at his phone after 9:00 p.m., in the hope of a fuller night’s sleep. He tried zinc. Fenugreek. Vitamin D. I’d already cut out alcohol, but now we both did, and eliminated caffeine as well.
“It seems unfair that this is causing us this much stress, yet we can’t have either of our favorite coping mechanisms for dealing with said stress,” he’d said to me.
“Tell me about it,” I said, blowing my nose and rubbing it red. “I’m not even taking anything for hay fever, in case.”
The one thing that did help was Gaz, who’d become a huge fan favorite on his first season of Ready, Set, Bake, in part because of how hard he wept: for his successes, for his failures, for the contestants who went home. Of which, sadly, he was one, bowing out in the fifth week after—of all things—he burned the puff pastry on a game pie. (He had sequestered himself for three weeks to grieve, at which point we stormed over to his flat with a bag of groceries and forced him to cook himself out of the darkness. He redid the pie to resounding success.) There was an entire Instagram account called The Gaztronomics, devoted to photos and GIFs and fan art and fun facts people dug up about him, including that he’d once punched the now Duke of Clarence in the jaw. (Which he had, but only to keep Nick from decking a paparazzo.)
“What does it say about me that this made him go up in people’s estimation?” Nick wondered.
“That you’re
