so much better than we were even six months ago. We’ll get ready. We’ll do the work. That’s why it takes so long for babies to percolate in there. They give you months to prepare.”
“I get what you’re saying. I do.” I let out a frustrated grunt. “I just wish this had happened when we decided it was the perfect time.”
“The perfect time doesn’t exist,” Nick said. “For anything. It was never the right time to kiss you, for example, but once I started, I couldn’t believe we’d waited. Maybe this will be like that.”
“You’re so composed,” I said, turning onto my side to look at him. “You are going to be a great father. Why is that so sexy?”
Nick grinned. “How do you think people end up with multiple children?” he asked. “Personally, I can’t wait to see you snuggling our baby. Whenever it happens. I just hope it gets your nose.”
I half laughed, burying my face in my hands. “Our baby. We’re going to have a baby.”
His answering smile almost split his face in two. “Do you want to get out of bed so I can pick you up and twirl you around?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Wait, no. I haven’t even been to the doctor yet. What if it’s a false alarm? We can’t deploy the twirl casually.”
“Mad as ever,” Nick said. He wriggled closer, and kissed me. “I love you,” he said. “Congratulations. I think we’ll be aces at this, I truly do.”
“I believe you,” I had said. “So please don’t take this the wrong way. But I think I need to throw up again.”
Now, Nick shook the bowl of Hula Hoops under my nose.
“How’s the nausea?” he asked. “Is the peanut hungry?”
“I believe it’s the size of a cherry at this point,” I said. “Or is it a raspberry? Anyway. Our little piece of fruit and I are always hungry.”
I poked the fingers of my right hand one by one through the little potato rings and then slid one into my mouth with my teeth. It crunched satisfyingly.
“These would taste great with peanut butter,” I said. “Am I already turning into one of those pregnant women with crazy cravings? Stop me if I ask for pickles in my ice cream.”
“Whatever my little raspberry wants,” Nick said.
We grinned at each other and clinked Hula Hoops before each biting them off our middle fingers. I was still barely pregnant; when we’d gone to the doctor, he told us I was probably six weeks along, handed me some prenatal vitamins, and ordered me to check back in a month or so. With each day that passed, every time I bumped my boobs and they hurt, every time I scrambled to the bathroom to barf in the middle of the night, this pregnancy had started to feel more real, and I was relaxing into the idea that this was the universe hard at work. And it was delicious for me and Nick to have a secret, one private thing that belonged only to us, as we went about our otherwise very public business.
Keldah Ansari came back on the news over a shot of Buckingham Palace, where a crowd of mourners was sobbing and placing wreaths next to framed photos, or lighting tiny glass-potted candles.
“She would have hated this,” Nick said.
“Unreservedly,” I said. “That almost makes it better.”
“She was the crabbiest person I’ve ever known,” Nick said, and his voice was thick. “She once gave me a welt the size of a plum from whacking my shin with that cane.”
If death could not take Eleanor, then apparently it settled for the next queen over. Marta died as she had lived: in the middle of a late-night Twitter fight. Her last communication to the world had been a GIF of Jennifer Lawrence sarcastically giving a thumbs-up, sent to @DuchClarH8r, who had been complaining I didn’t deserve to wear Emma’s ring because I was a crusty social-climbing hag.
I was touched. Royal historians had no idea what texture they were missing.
Marta had made it a generous 104 years, so although her passing was somber news, I couldn’t say it was an actively tragic development; enjoying a century of robust health and then dying in your own bed is the best-case scenario for any of us. She had lived through two world wars, the moon landing, the Berlin Wall coming down, and the invention of television and the internet and her beloved mobile phone. She had been the final empress of India, a muse