“You left us twisting in the wind,” Nick snapped. “Did it not occur to you that we might have wanted or needed to talk about what happened?”
He glared at Nick. “Perhaps skipping town when faced with a complex emotional issue is genetic,” he shot back.
“But didn’t you want to talk about it?” I asked. “This was a huge thing that happened.”
Richard’s lips twitched, and he took a sip of scotch from the bottle. “It was, and that’s precisely why I left,” he said. “I keep my own counsel. I am not accustomed to doing it any other way. I admit, it was not ideal, but I needed distance and space to think.”
“And we needed you,” Nick said.
“For that, again, I apologize.” Richard sounded very weary.
“You’re here now, though,” I offered.
“Indeed,” Richard said. He tapped the bottle absently. “I can see why you stayed in Scotland as long as you did. It was freeing, having no one to please but myself. And coming back feels like giving Mother a victory I don’t want her to have. I know she didn’t start this. But she did finish it, and when I think about the marks this lie made on me, on my childhood…” He took a drink, and rolled the whisky around in his mouth before swallowing hard and wincing.
“Once Henry was gone, Mother started treating me as if I were fifteen and not five,” Richard continued. “Was I representing her properly. Was I standing up straight enough. Was I informed enough, was I being too silly, was I allowed to want to read comics and pretend to fly planes in my own nursery. She certainly seemed to think not. Anything fun, I did in secret. I was anxious all the time. I never seemed to live up to what she wanted me to be, yet also never knew quite what that was. And then I grew up into…into this.” He spread his hands, the bottle in the right one sloshing. “I made the wrong choice of partner, because I had no one to guide me. I was a distant father, because I knew no other way, and the Crown came first. I handled your mother and her illness poorly. I lived one lie by my own choosing and it made my life lonely, and it turns out I’ve been living another one this entire time, and it’s ruined me in its own way, too.”
He swigged again. I had never even seen Richard drink out of a soda can, much less a bottle of booze. It was disorienting. The perfectly controlled Prince Richard, letting his grip slip.
“I was young when my father died, but I have memories of him,” he said. “He was kind to me, I know that. But even at that age I could tell something was missing, like he wasn’t truly there even when he was. I wonder what would have been different if he’d been allowed to raise me with…her. Or…” He shook his head. “The more it all sank in after I left, the more I thought, I wish they’d sent me to some other family.”
Nick let out a low whistle.
“This felt like it. A chance to break out and be my own man, at last, the one Georgina might have helped me to be,” he said. “My position brings with it great privilege, but it has also been an albatross, and in these last few weeks I have wanted so badly to throw it off and never look back. The throne isn’t meant to be mine, so why take it? Why not, at last, be free?”
He and Nick stared at each other for a long moment, bleary and laid bare.
“I came so close, Nicholas,” Richard whispered. “But Georgina made this sacrifice so that I could live free of the taint of their scandal. She never breathed a word to me. She never even hinted. She watched me from afar and went to her grave believing her son would be king, and if that sustained her at all in life, then I cannot take that from her even after death. Abdicating would be a slap in the face to Mother, but also to…my first mother, and I cannot bring myself to do that.”
“So you’re staying,” Nick translated. “And I assume you’re going to ask us to, too, and to bury this the same way Gran did.”
Richard ran his free hand through his hair, in a gesture that reminded me of Nick. “Edwin vanished