Our last stop in Canada was at Whistler, which included a trip on the famed gondola that stretches more than two miles between the resort’s peaks. Nick and I had been allowed to ride totally alone in one of the twenty-five-person glass-enclosed pods, gliding a mile high above a perfect canopy of evergreens sparkling in the sun. Below to the left, I saw a bear edging toward a river that snaked down the slope.
“Eleven minutes of heaven,” I said. “This is incredible. A private gondola, this view to ourselves. We are the luckiest people.”
Nick intertwined our fingers. “I have never felt luckier,” he said. Then he scooted so we were touching and nipped at my ear. “On many levels.”
“We shouldn’t miss a second of this view,” I teased. “What if there’s a quiz?”
“Seen one tree, you’ve seen them all,” he said. “But I’ve never fooled around with my wife while dangling from a pod over the earth, and I don’t mind telling you, the danger is very alluring.”
I pretended to pat myself down. “Where is that schedule? I didn’t see a visit to the Mile-High Club on it.”
“Tell me, madam, are they letting anyone else ride this in either direction while we’re here?”
“I don’t believe they are, sir,” I said. “Besides, it sure would be hard to tell what we’re doing in here, if we’re in the right place.”
“So we can investigate the blind spots.” His hand drifted. “For eleven minutes.”
“I dare you,” I purred.
Nick whistled, low and under his breath. “You’re on.”
* * *
Lacey and I had graduated from Cornell in upstate New York, so I’d done Manhattan more than a few times. We would take the long train ride into the city for a weekend spent whipsawing from the Guggenheim to Saks Fifth Avenue to nosebleed seats at Madison Square Garden, to a French bistro she knew Jennifer Aniston frequented, to a subterranean bar whose only sign was made of lightbulbs that spelled out BAR. I took us on the subway and wanted to walk for blocks; Lacey preferred cabs, especially at night, when people would turn their lights on and leave their windows open and we could peek into their apartments and their lives—their dinner parties, their built-in bookshelves, their dying balcony plants, packaged as thirty-second soap operas during the crawl up Tenth Avenue. As the skyline rose up now in front of me and Nick, I felt like I was reuniting with an old friend.
“It’s so lumpy,” was Nick’s poetic take.
“That is not a word I have ever heard used about New York,” I said.
“I just mean, everything along the way is pretty low and flat, and then, boom, all that height. It’s like when you shave your legs and miss an entire knee.”
He tickled mine and I swatted his hand away. I looked out at the city, all tall boxes and stone and steel, peppered with cranes and scaffolding, a city created so much by modernity as opposed to one carved by history that technology simply caught up to without asking permission. So much of our relationship had been Nick opening doors for me—sometimes of literal castles—but this was Bex Porter’s turf. I had a past here, and I was excited to introduce it to my present.
Nick had cast aside Bea’s seminal achievement in underestimating our intelligence—a binder called Washington, DC, Is Not a State—and was glued to the car window like a little kid. “A hot dog cart!” he narrated. “Oh, I think I read about that restaurant. Ooh, look, yellow taxis. Can we get bagels?”
“I am definitely not leaving without a bagel,” I assured him.
My phone buzzed. So did Nick’s. Simultaneously, we glanced down at them and made matching strangled sounds.
SHE’S A ROYAL BEXHIBITIONIST!
Bon appetit! The global media may be made to masticate its recent worshipful words about the Duke and Duchess of Clarence’s Canadian cavorting, because it appears our lady is a tramp. Photos exclusive to The Sun reveal a half-naked Reckless Rebecca flashing her goods in the Whistler gondola, risking the reputation of the entire monarchy for one tacky tryst. You can take it from me: This not-so-clandestine cock-up shames not only the country but the Commonwealth. The Queen and her regent Richard will be roiling with rage…
Clive’s column ran next to four photos shot from a long-range lens. It looked like someone had gone rogue and flown an illegal drone that we hadn’t noticed; its distance from us meant the photos weren’t in superb focus, but you could see my bare breasts. My skin felt hot from shame. Nick and I had not actually rounded the bases up there, but he had bet the inner daredevil of my youth that I couldn’t take off my shirt and get it properly back on again before we hit the other support pole. The resultant snap was me taunting my husband in a funny, flirtatious moment we had thought was our own.
“Those bastards,” Nick seethed.
The faces of the people who had now seen my nipples—poorly censored in print, or in their entirety online—flashed before my eyes. Agatha. Richard. The Queen. Freddie, depending on where he was and whether he had Wi-Fi. Everyone who was currently renovating our flat. Gaz. Gaz. He would die of embarrassment before I did. My breath quickened, and I rolled down the window to inhale some of New York’s complex July air. It didn’t help.
“I am going to sue The Sun into obsolescence,” Nick added, almost to the rhythm of his pulsing forehead vein. “And I’m going to fly back to London and murder Clive. I should have murdered him last year when I had the chance.”
“I am an idiot,” I said, turning to him. “We were there for work.”
“We’d given
