I slowed to a walk, panting, at our battered front door and let myself inside. I found Nick in the garden poking morosely at a tomato.
“Another one bites the dust?” I asked, picking up his coffee from the patio table and taking a sip. “Ugh, too much sugar.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with these tomatoes. Maybe they need a pep talk,” he said, squinting at one limp-looking vine.
“You look more like you do.”
His gaze stayed fixed on the veggies for a long while. Then he lifted his other hand to reveal a rolled-up newspaper, which he handed to me. I unfurled it and was met with the headline FAITHLESS FREDDIE AND NERVELESS NICK.
“As you can see, I haven’t entirely quit the papers,” he said.
I scanned the article, which suggested that while Freddie had done him a grievous wrong, Nick was the bigger loser here for not jettisoning his evil wife. Inside were shots of Freddie at various recent appearances, both with Richard and without, accompanied by captions praising his busy schedule.
“I hate this,” Nick said. “I don’t know what I thought would happen when we left, but it wasn’t being made the villain, and it definitely wasn’t my brother being hailed as a hero for doing actual work for once in his life.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Makes me glad we’re gone, if that’s how they feel.”
“See, it makes me think we need to go back,” I said softly. “I haven’t wanted to bring this up, because I didn’t want to be the one to say it. We’ve always been good in a bubble. But…”
“But staying in the bubble too long has historically been bad for us,” Nick finished. “I know.”
“I’ll grant you that a bit of a bubble is important,” I said. “This bubble gave us a chance to ground ourselves. And I learned a ton about you. Like, for example, that you will need ten more years to finish knitting that scarf—”
“It’s a sock,” he said defensively.
“And that you overcook chicken on purpose because it freaks you out.”
“And you are an even worse cook than I am,” he said, “but are getting very adept at watercolors, and I can’t wait to hang some of your pieces from Wigtown in our house.”
“But that house is in London,” I said. “Whether we want it to be or not. And unless we show up soon, what’s in the papers is only going to get worse. We can’t pretend that whole other part of our lives doesn’t exist.”
“Why not?” he asked. “It’s worked so far.”
“Has it? Because I’m starting to think we’ve been fooling ourselves.”
The silence between us stretched and expanded, and I let it, having learned not to rush Nick into his feelings. He walked away from me and fussed with some of the other vegetables in the garden, then kicked the grass and looked at the cottage.
“They say nothing good can last,” he said.
“We can last,” I said, coming up next to him and sliding an arm around his waist. “I think we’re pretty good.”
“I feel like I’m about to say goodbye to a friend I’ll never see again,” he said. “And I don’t only mean Steve and Margot, although she was a proper vixen.”
I let my head fall against him. “Margot will never really leave. She’ll just start plucking her eyebrows again.”
He took my hand and rubbed at the spot where my ring should be. We’d left the famed Lyons Emerald back at Kensington Palace for safekeeping.
“I don’t want this,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying, but I still don’t want to do it.”
“Neither do I, but I don’t think it matters,” I replied. “I think we have to deal with a lot of stuff we don’t want to, including—”
A bracing knock came at the door, followed a second later by Nick’s cell phone blaring Taylor Swift on the nearby patio table.
“I’ll get the door, you get Taylor,” I said.
I marched back inside as I heard Nick answer the phone. With one glance through the peephole, I gasped audibly, and pulled open the door.
“Greetings, Your Royal Highness,” said PPO Stout, an apologetic look on his face. “You really shouldn’t open the door without your wig on.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, waving him inside and closing the door. “I mean, I knew you were here, probably, but not here here…”
“I believe the duke may have some intel on that,” Stout said.
Nick appeared and shook Stout’s hand, but his face was white as a sheet.
“Gran’s had a heart attack,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.”
* * *
Eleanor tended to dash off to her home in the northeastern Scottish countryside more than was reasonable, given its distance from the monarchy’s official seat in London. Balmoral had been a royal refuge dating all the way back to the reign of Victoria I, whose husband Albert purchased it in the 1800s and built it up into a sprawling granite fairy-tale castle. Eleanor claimed to find it a welcome hideout from the honking, touristy bustle of London, but Nick suspected part of the appeal was that Balmoral was entirely hers: It was not owned by the Crown, and nothing but the majestic old ballroom was open to the public. That she’d fallen ill there meant we only had to drive four hours to her bedside, but it’s still agony to spend four hours driving toward a family you stormed away from, after learning its most important member is dying.
I stared out the window but saw none of the scenery. My heart pounded, echoing the memory of Eleanor’s heels clacking on the Buckingham Palace
