about five years ago. It was a stunning canary-and-white manor on the water with a giant terrace and regal double stone staircase in the back, descending to the impressive lawns.
“It’s basically Captain von Trapp’s house,” I hissed to Nick, passing him the file that had been handed to me. “There’s even a gazebo.”
“Please make me lederhosen out of drapes,” he murmured back.
An assortment of baubles was divided evenly among me and Elizabeth and Freddie, for the use of his future bride; Freddie, who wasn’t present due to his forthcoming interview, had already accepted them and promised to donate them to a museum collection if they went unused, which I found a bittersweet stipulation. I’d been given, among other things, a topaz cocktail ring that I recognized as the one Marta had been wearing when we watched the Cubs win. As this was announced, Agatha’s fists were balled up so hard, she could have crushed all the aforementioned pieces into a fine dust.
“And, finally, Princess Agatha is to inherit Queen Marta’s sapphire suite,” the lawyer finished, the words sapphire suite booming out so loudly they nearly reverberated.
“Oh!” Agatha gasped with pure, uncontained joy. “But of course I’d prefer she was still with us,” she recovered theatrically, even as she smacked a hand on the paperwork and drew it toward herself with unseemly haste.
Richard capped off the meeting with a few lingering agenda items, and then everyone scattered—back to their day-to-day lives, their meetings and workshops, the official book closed on the life of a matriarch who’d seen more than a century. Life and death was as much a business affair in The Firm as anything else.
Nick drummed his hands on his leg nervously. “Ten minutes to go,” he said. “I wonder if he’s ready. Should I check on him? Maybe not. Maybe?”
“He’s probably nervous enough without you staring at him,” I said. “Why don’t you go kill some time by irritating Barnes? I need a Diet Coke, but I’ll meet you in there.”
“Excellent plan,” Nick said, kissing my cheek as he headed off toward Barnes’s office. It gave me a frisson of joy to think about how annoyed Richard’s imperious right-hand man would be to get any kind of unscheduled visit from anyone.
I heard a voice emanating from the foyer, and followed the sound in time to see the staff greeting another arrival for the day: Princess Daphne, shrugging off her plaid wool coat, with blond waves that looked recently brightened bouncing out of a matching hat.
“Bex!” she said. “You look wonderfully well.”
“Thank you,” I said, returning her smile. “And thank you so much for the flowers. They were the prettiest thing in the entire house.”
“I wanted you to have some good cheer,” she said. “I know how it feels when the walls start to close in but you’re not ready to leave them. I’m just sorry I couldn’t have visited myself. I had to dash back home for Christmas.”
“But you’re here now,” I said, masking my surprise. We walked into the main drawing room, where the camera crew was finishing its setup, and sat down on a sofa that had been pushed to the side of the room under a painting of the Duke of Wellington riding into battle at Waterloo.
“Freddie is uneasy about this,” Daphne said. “He needed moral support.”
“You two seem to have gotten really close,” I observed.
Daphne peered at me through long, darkened eyelashes. “Does that surprise you?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, and in the end, I said so.
“Perhaps I should rephrase,” she said. “Are you uncomfortable with that?”
“Of course not.”
But I was, a little. I couldn’t put my finger on why.
Freddie walked in at that moment, handsome in a gray suit. He looked tense.
“There’s a lot going on in that head,” she observed, nodding toward him. “Freddie was very worried for you that night, you know. Frightened.”
“He wasn’t the only one,” I said.
“Frightened in the way one is when they might lose someone important to them,” she pressed.
I shifted to face her. “Daphne, Freddie and I will always be important to each other.”
“I think you know that I don’t mean friendship,” Daphne said. “And the way you reached for him…”
“I was having a miscarriage,” I said, feeling defensiveness creep into my tone. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating, but—”
“I’m phrasing this badly,” Daphne amended, waving her hands in an apologetic gesture. “It’s simply that from where I stand, from where I was standing, I couldn’t help but wonder if there will ever be room