“In retrospect, it was incredibly naïve to think there wasn’t going to be any fallout with him,” Freddie sighed. “Nick’s just always been so…reasonable. It was easy to convince myself that his even keel knew no bounds.” He scratched at his costume beard. “How is he? How are you two doing?”
“We’re good,” I said. “We were in a strange place. But I don’t think he’d mind me telling you that he’s been seeing a therapist. It’s helped a lot. Have you thought about doing that, too?”
“Technically I have seen a therapist,” he said with a wink. “More than one. But let’s talk about you. Are you ready for the trip?”
“The prep has been insane, but yes,” I said. I wrapped my arms around my torso. “I can’t believe I get to go home. I realized yesterday that it’s the first time I’ll have been in the States since my dad died.”
Freddie looked surprised, then elbowed me affectionately. “We’re going to need ice cream for this.”
Ten minutes later, he returned with two vanilla cones that had Cadbury Flakes poking out the top.
“A Double-99,” he said, handing one to me. We sat down under a leafy tree and leaned against the bark. “English summertime classic.”
“That line looked way longer than you took.”
“I gave my money to a woman near the front and said these were for two sobbing children. So please look sad, and young.” He licked some off his finger. “Now. Back on topic.” He affected a rich baritone. “I’m listening.”
I snorted with laughter. “Thanks, Dr. Crane. Longtime listener, first-time caller,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. I think about Dad all the time, no matter where I am.”
“I know you do,” he said. “That’s not what stood out. It’s the way you talked about America. You called it home.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You absolutely did,” he said, and took a sloppy bite of vanilla soft-serve.
“Huh.” I frowned at the toes of my sneakers, stretched out in front of me. “I wonder how often I do that.”
“You never talk about missing America,” Freddie said. “You never really talk about America at all.”
I pulled out a Flake and nibbled the end. I’d lived in the UK since I graduated from college, and although I thought about my parents often, I didn’t dwell too much on home (there was that word again) in my day-to-day life. There were things I missed about my country of origin—measuring things in inches and pounds and Fahrenheit, being able to watch baseball live—but I lived in a palace with a person I loved very much. Still, my heart had leapt a little bit to see the United States on the itinerary, even though we weren’t going anywhere near Iowa.
“It’s not that I don’t feel at home here.” I chewed on the Flake as some chocolate pieces crumbled onto my shirt. “But I guess I didn’t choose England so much as I chose Nick. And it was a package deal. It always felt like my home here was the person, and not the place.”
“It probably doesn’t help that everyone here thinks of you as ‘the American,’” Freddie said.
“I’m not legally an American anymore. I certainly don’t feel British. I’m…” The Flake was melting in my hand, so I popped the rest into my mouth while I searched for the words. “Kind of nothing. And people have expectations of me here that are not necessarily the expectations I imagined for myself, but I still have to live up to them, and…I don’t know. It’s hard to find myself in that sometimes.”
Freddie looked up at the canopy of leaves over our heads. “I understand how that feels, a bit,” he said.
I blew out my breath. “Wow, this really did turn into a therapy session.”
“My hourly rates are very reasonable, if you want to keep talking it out,” Freddie said, elegantly slurping the drips from the bottom of his diminishing cone. “But if you haven’t been in America for a while, it also means you haven’t left us for a while. Maybe you’ll miss bits about England in the same way.”
“Or I’ll get over there and decide all those Americans are irritating and start complaining about why there aren’t proper scones,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“Right. About that,” he said, rubbing at his left knee. “It looks like I won’t be here.”
Flake number two chose that moment to faint gracefully out of my pooling ice cream and into my lap.
“Crap,” I said, picking it up and brushing at the stain. “I already used up my napkin.” I blotted at the puddle of ice cream on my cargo shorts. “Whatever. No one cares how Margot looks in public. What are you talking about? Where are you going? Can I not just call you?”
Freddie was staring off to the right at an obelisk that sat atop three stone steps, with the word SPEKE carved into the base. “See that?” he said, pointing. “That right there is an expensive homage to futility. The good Mr. Speke believed he’d discovered the source of the Nile, but the day before a public debate with his archrival about it, he died mysteriously by his own gun.”
“Whoa,” I said. “I smell foul play.”
“The thing is, Speke turned out to be correct. Everyone celebrated this amazing thing he’d done, solving a geographic riddle. But he was long gone. Isn’t that sad?” he asked. “Plugging away at life, bit by bit, and then dying before you find out whether you did anything of consequence.”
I blinked. “Am I going to like where this is going?”
“Probably not.” Freddie took a deep breath. “I’m joining the Special Boat Service,” he said. “It’s an elite tactical wing
