“Thanks, Fred, but I’ve got this,” Nick said, and slung an arm around my shoulders.
“Aye, aye, captain.” Freddie saluted sarcastically before heading toward dinner.
“Don’t make the damn apology a competition, too,” I hissed at Nick, pushing his arm off. “I am over you two trying to outdo each other like we’re in some kind of stupid Royal Usefulness Pageant or something.”
“But I look so dashing in a sash,” Nick teased.
“No. Don’t you do that twinkly thing,” I said. “Go. I’ll be there in a second.”
Lacey and I watched him walk off, and then she shook her head slowly.
“They’re never going to work this out themselves, are they?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question. “Eleanor was right. It is going to come down to me.”
In truth, I’d trusted that once I got the boys talking again, their natural pull—those years of being each other’s constant—would take over and do the rest. But I’d been fooling myself. We were deep in some insidious psychological muck. It was unfair to make me be the one to start digging us out of it when they were fully capable of picking up a shovel, but I’d underestimated how stubborn two grown men could be.
Lacey walked over and entwined her arm with mine. “Happy birthday, Bex,” she said. “For once, I’m glad I’m not in your shoes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nick apologized profusely once the party wound down and we were curled up in the floral fiasco that was our master bedroom. He said all the expected things—he was deranged from lack of sleep, he loved me, he had not meant to sideline my birthday—and I knew he meant them, but none of it got to the heart of why I was upset. Simply put, I was embarrassed, both by him and for him. He and Freddie had sounded like the worst, most shallow versions of themselves—which I told him, sharply, and he agreed, before giving me my birthday present: a case of Cubs-branded wine and two shatterproof glasses for drinking it on our terrace. It seemed bitchy to keep yelling at him after that.
But as Nick fell more deeply into work, I fretted that he’d sidestepped my point instead of absorbing it. He accepted assignments like he was on a mission to out-king the regent himself, and when Richard responded by putting Freddie out on the trail in kind, it redoubled Nick’s desire to keep his nose to the royal grindstone. My hat was off to Prince Dick: He knew how to keep both his sons at a boil that suited his PR needs. If this was a snapshot of how Richard would run things when he really was king, the whole line would die out of exhaustion. It made me doubly antsy because of how far Nick and Freddie and I were drifting away from each other; it wasn’t so much two and one anymore, as Freddie had once described our former trio to me, but more like one and one and one—three points of a triangle with so much empty space in between.
Instead of cracking skulls to get everyone in sync again, I decided to take a warmer, fuzzier tack. I hadn’t celebrated a proper Thanksgiving in England since the year Nick and I first hooked up, when I’d gone to meet him at Windsor Castle and he’d ended a private tour—and accordingly, the platonic portion of our relationship—with a feast he’d arranged based on my family specialties. Maybe a flashback to that would remind Nick of a time when things were simpler and better. So I laid enough of a sob story on Marj that she felt either sorry for me or sick of me, and pulled strings to make sure Nick had Thanksgiving off. I then called my mom for cooking advice.
“Remember to take out the plastic bag of giblets,” she’d said, once she stopped laughing at the idea of me throwing a dinner party for which I actually cooked. “On our first Thanksgiving together, your father forgot, and the entire apartment smelled so foul that we went to the Holiday Inn for a week.”
Lacey ended up staying in London after our birthday. Ollie had decided to return to his position at Cambridge, and had asked her to move in with him when they both finished in Kenya. The prospective social buffer of their presence seemed to make it easier for Freddie to accept our invitation, though he declined to bring the chemist he’d been courting.
“Not everyone can knock off work on a Thursday for a boozy early dinner, Killer,” he teased.
Lacey took over the job of making our beloved Chex Mix, and Olly was bringing something from his father’s bakery. We’d invited the Omundis to join us, but they politely declined. A photo of Lacey and Olly at the theater had led to a minor resurgence in public curiosity about Lacey, and I didn’t blame Olly’s parents for wanting to steer clear—though I was encouraged, and pleasantly surprised, that Lacey herself also seemed disinclined to stoke the flames.
“I kind of forgot anyone here might give a shit,” she’d said, but not with the awe she’d have used even a year ago.
I liked Olly instantly. He was muscular but compact—not much taller than me or Lacey, but with rock-solid biceps, from what his short-sleeve collared shirt displayed. His aura was of an endearing low-level nervousness; the way his eyebrows arched over his thick-framed black glasses gave his face the impression of constant hopeful anticipation, as if he simply cared very much about everything going well for the people in his life, and wanted to be the first to smile when it did.
“…not at all unlike elephant herds, actually, because the matriarch really sets the tone for the herd and they’re very reliant on her,” Olly was now saying to Nick, squeezing his left thumb with his right hand in a way that I would come to realize was his
