“Poor thing was mortified,” Daphne said, sticking her head into the FaceTime frame and giving me a little wave. “Her hands were shaking so hard.”
“I have that effect,” Freddie said. “I can’t help it. I’m magnetic.”
“Obviously,” I snorted.
“We took one like that for posterity,” he said. “If we draw a little hat on it, it could be our Christmas card.”
“Always thinking ahead,” Daphne said. “But turn your phone around and show Bex those paintings, Freddie. She’d much rather see the art than our faces.”
“Nonsense, you are the art,” he said theatrically. “My beautiful bride.”
Daphne beamed at him moonily. Freddie was really committing to this. And thank goodness for that, because tomorrow, the press and the public would find out that Prince Frederick had placed King Hendrik-Alexander’s mother’s engagement ring—an orange tourmaline evoking the Dutch national color—on the Princess of Orange’s finger. The UK’s third in line to the throne now essentially belonged to the kingdom of the Netherlands.
I leaned in to try to see more details over their shoulders.
“Your palace is stunning, Daphne,” I said. “How do you not spend all day sitting in the middle of the floor? I wish I could climb through the screen. It makes me want to paint right now.”
Daphne grabbed the phone from Freddie and turned it on the Huis ten Bosch ballroom. The paneled walls and arches of the odd-shaped room were covered floor to ceiling with seventeenth-century paintings, with an octagonal viewing gallery in the center designed to let in light from the heavens. It was incredible, like living inside every piece of art all at once, and it was largely unknown because it wasn’t open to the public—but it would go down in history now as the site of Freddie’s and Daphne’s engagement portraits.
“We’ll sneak you in when you come for the wedding,” Daphne said. “If not sooner, perhaps? I suspect my parents will be planning a ridiculous number of events.”
“Lax loves a good party,” came Freddie’s voice from off camera.
“And why one, when there can be ten,” Daphne joked.
“When will you both come back here so I can hug you?” I asked.
“Daphne’s here for the foreseeable,” Freddie said. “But I’ll darken your doorstep on Wednesday. I’ll be going back and forth for ages, trying to reassure all my patronages that I’m not pissing off into the sunset forever.”
“No one thinks that,” I said.
“From your lips to Knickers’s ears,” Freddie said, then he caught himself, and blanched. “Please tell me he’s not standing off camera.”
“He is downstairs knitting something undefinable that you should both hope is not a wedding present,” I said. “But if he knew you were going to call, he’d have come up to say hi. We’re both impatient to celebrate with you properly.”
Nick had actually started to walk in, and then walked right back out when he heard Freddie’s voice. I’d let him. His Aggressively Pleasant face had been getting a workout lately and it was due for a rest; he’d been feeling his brother’s daily absence even more keenly than when Freddie was in the military—this was less deadly, yes, but potentially more permanent. But after a few perambulations around our garden the day Freddie told us, he’d gone in search of his brother to express his support and erase some of the sting of his first reaction. Especially in light of Freddie’s huge favor to us.
“The last time I buried my real feelings about Freddie’s decision making, it poisoned us all,” he’d told me. “I’m glad I was honest. But now I have to make sure he still feels his family in his life, so that no matter what happens, he knows he’ll always have a home here.” He’d shot me a helpless look. “If you’d told me as a boy that my relationship with Freddie would be the one that demanded the toughest balancing act, I’d have told you to get stuffed.”
Daphne brought me back into the present. “Have you had your appointment yet, Bex?” she asked, affixing a look of casual interest onto her face. “That’s today, yes?”
“Ah, yes, it’s, um, in about twenty minutes actually,” I said. “I didn’t know you—”
“Of course he told me,” she said. “We’re getting married. No secrets.”
I opened my mouth to let fly a sarcastic rejoinder, but thought better of it, and bit it back. Daphne wasn’t a sarcastic person. She couldn’t have meant that as a jab at my own premarital skeletons. Her tone was pleasant, but I could see tension at the edges of her eyes, and then I felt guilty. This situation was emotionally complicated for her, too.
“I’ll let you both know how it goes,” I said. “Talk to you soon. Have fun today.”
I disconnected the call and stared at the blank, dark screen, in which I could see a faint reflection of myself. It reminded me of the windows that night at The Shard, when Eleanor had first fallen ill, and again on the train, where I had stood staring fruitlessly out into the growing dark as hidden scenery sped past us. So much gazing into the unknown.
Maybe I had been going about this all wrong. In judging Freddie’s rapport with Daphne, I’d been searching for a familiar love in his face—a heat and a depth of yearning that resembled the way he’d looked at me, as if that were a benchmark by which all his feelings should be measured. But that passion had also been peppered with guilt and torment, a pleasure that could only also bring him pain. None of that was in his eyes with Daphne, because it didn’t exist with her. She didn’t come with the dark side. Their relationship was fresh, untarnished, uncomplicated.
Heat is wonderful, until it burns you.
* * *
The nurses at Dr. Akhtar’s clinic knew me well by now. Cycle after cycle, I’d come in every two days to get my egg production checked, to make sure everything was proceeding according to plan. We’d made small talk. I’d
