I reached out and covered her hand with my own, and for a second, she let me.
“Heartbreak doesn’t heal without scar tissue. If it happens enough, you harden. To everything,” she said, signaling Hazel and pointing to her empty glass. “I don’t want that for those boys.”
“I think they’re both tougher than Georgina was,” I said. “Look at how Freddie—”
“I’m not talking about Georgina.” Eleanor sat back against the wall, eyes unusually bright. “What you couldn’t read in that letter, Rebecca, is that it worked. She made Henry love her back. And I had to live with it. I’m not only the Nicholas in this story. I’m also the Frederick.”
I didn’t know what to say. My stomach churned. “I’m so sorry, Eleanor.”
She blocked her mouth with her hand as if she were rubbing her cheek. “I have trusted you,” she said, “with my greatest pain. I trust again that you will lay it to rest now, where it belongs, along with Henry and Georgina themselves. Nobody but you and my mother knows, and it will stay that way.”
“I can’t keep this from Nick,” I told her. “It’s not possible.”
“It is, and it’s easy,” Eleanor said. “You simply don’t mention it. This is not your secret to tell. What good will it do for him to know how history has repeated itself?”
I hated promising to lie to my husband, even if it was only a lie of omission. But I didn’t know how to push back, and I decided that I could figure out whether to keep that promise later.
“All right,” I said. “You win.”
“Enough,” Eleanor said. “I came here to enjoy myself. I am the Queen. I don’t sulk in corners.”
She rose, and made her way toward the crowd—to what end, I did not know, because I still felt woozy and sick from our conversation in a way that was becoming increasingly urgent. Trusting that Nick had a handle on things, I scurried as casually as I could to the bathroom, and barely made it in the stall before depositing fragments of appetizers and my entire glass of Champagne into the toilet bowl. I sat back on my heels and breathed deeply, glad to be done with that.
Wait, no, I wasn’t done with that.
“Bex?” I heard Lacey say. She pushed open the stall door, then wheeled around and locked the bathroom itself. “Oh no, sweetie,” she said, coming to brush my hair off my face.
“I’m okay,” I told her. “I’ve been tired lately, and—”
Ugh. I still wasn’t done.
“Blargh,” I said as I got up to rinse out my mouth. “I hope it’s not the passed apps. Eleanor went to town on those.” I frowned. “I should check on her.”
Lacey folded her arms and followed me out of the bathroom and back down the pub’s narrow hallway toward her wedding reception. “It’s not food poisoning,” she hissed. “I recognize that look on your face. Because I saw it on mine about six months ago.”
I stopped in my tracks. “You’re hilarious,” I said.
Lacey raised a brow. “Weren’t you just telling me how tired you’ve been?”
“My sleep schedule is off because of the World Series!”
“And your boobs look bigger.”
“This is a fantastic bra,” I said.
To my relief, Eleanor was not doubled over in the corner revisiting everything she’d consumed that evening. Instead, Gaz was expertly guiding her in an offbeat waltz to Sir Rod’s “Forever Young.” She whispered something to him and he kissed her hand with a flourish before twirling her carefully. For a woman who’d been on at least partial bed rest for God knows how long, she seemed impossibly spry.
I, however, speed-walked back to the bathroom, and felt Lacey’s hands holding back my hair as I vomited. Again.
When I was done, hopefully for real this time, I leaned back against the wall and inhaled sharply. Big mistake. Like all pub bathrooms, this one smelled of bleach and urinal cakes.
I thought back to the last few months. I guess I had been less aggro about taking my Pill at exactly the same hour every morning. I’d gotten confused when we were on tour about adapting it to the time zones, and never got back on track. But they weren’t that sensitive, were they? Besides, I’d had my…
Wait. I counted, and then I looked at my twin sister, whose smug smile met my frozen wide eyes.
Then I grabbed the bowl one more time.
ACT THREE
Men and kings must be judged in the testing moments of their lives.
—Winston Churchill
CHAPTER ONE
Niles Kensington might have missed the wedding, but he made it back for the funeral.
Three weeks after Lacey got married, I woke up in the middle of the night, and Nick wasn’t in bed. This wasn’t, on its own, surprising; he’d always been a bad sleeper. But even through a bleary half-open eye I could tell he wasn’t in the corner reading or up in Sex Den with a crossword, and I didn’t hear a telltale clanking from the kitchenette down the hall. The alarm clock next to the bed cheerfully hit 2:48 a.m. My standard instinct was to leave Nick to his insomnia, but under the circumstances, it seemed prudent to check.
I tiptoed downstairs. I could hear the low sound of the TV emanating from Nick’s study.
“For those of you up late with us tonight, we’ll be back after the break with live updates from outside Buckingham Palace,” a woman was saying
