I slowly—so slowly—maneuvered myself into an upright position. On the TV, Penelope Ten-Names was standing in front of Nieuwe Kerk, interviewing the mayor. The press that traveled to Amsterdam to cover this happy ending—the proper fairy tale Nick and I had failed to deliver—still had stories to file, even though the VIP guests had already escaped. Freddie and Daphne were en route to a villa in the Maldives with ten days to do, as Lady Elizabeth had so sensitively put it, nothing but each other.
My stomach was gurgling—that samosa was not sitting well with me—and a weekend in Amsterdam, on full display, had worn me out way more than I thought. I lay back on my pillow and groaned.
“What can I do for you?” Nick fretted.
“Nothing. I’m just anxious and need to sleep,” I told him. “I would love to put off finishing the conversation Richard started, but it’s the only thing I can think about.”
“Me too,” he admitted. “This whole thing is rather a mindfuck.”
“Are you tempted?” I asked.
“Aren’t you?” Nick chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Picture it: a cottage in the UK somewhere, raising up the kids in peace, walking them to the village school. Having crumbling headstones in a churchyard in fifty years where our children could always find us and scatter rose petals on our graves and recite poetry and cry. We could even get jobs.” He sounded wistful in the way that only a person who’d never had a proper office job would sound.
One of the twins gave a very aggressive kick. My stomach lurched. “Ow,” I said, touching the spot of impact.
“Do you think that was a vote for or against?” Nick asked. He leaned toward it. “Hello? BBC Two and ITV, do either of you have a thought?”
“Here’s one way to look at it,” I said. “I’ve led a normal life. I can go back to that and be perfectly fine. But can you do it? Do you really know what it means?”
“If I could snap my fingers and make it so that I had never been royal? I’d do it. I really think I would,” he said. “The idea of being able to live in a quiet hole somewhere, being unremarkable, is a dream.”
“But you can’t, and that’s the problem,” I said. “The closest you ever got was Wigtown, and even then, we were being protected and bankrolled by your family. That’s not real life.”
“Do you not want to give this up?” he asked. “Is there any part of you that would feel differently about being married to me if we chucked all this?”
“That is mental and you know it,” I said. “You’re stuck with me until the end of the road, buddy, no matter which one it is. I’m just trying to be practical.”
“I know the baked-in fancy part of my personality is the crux of my sex appeal,” he joked. “Be honest, you’ve never been able to resist a man with his own heraldic flag.”
“No, the real draw was your family history of syphilis,” I said. “That, and your forearms.”
Nick grinned. “It is a relief that even in complicated circumstances, we can still be glib.”
“I would never be glib about these,” I told him, grabbing his arm and giving it a messy kiss.
He brought his knees to his chest and hugged them. “My entire life I’ve been complaining that I’ve never been given a choice, and now that I have one, it’s paralyzing.” He drummed his fingers on his shins. “To go, or not to go. That is the question. Which, by the way, you haven’t answered yet, either.”
I shifted again, trying in vain to feel better, and pictured myself as I was before. That girl who only wore jeans and hair elastics—in a ponytail with no extensions enhancing it—felt very far away from me now, and it was alluring to imagine jumping off the hamster wheel of being a public figure and getting reacquainted with her. But there was more than a decade between her and me, and what if—
Suddenly, I felt a telltale wetness underneath me. “We have to go.”
“It was that easy?” Nick looked at me, puzzled. “No indecision?”
I gestured to my stomach. “To the hospital,” I said. “I think my water broke.”
* * *
The shock of it immediately sent me into denial. I wasn’t even at thirty-four weeks yet, and everything had progressed normally to date; surely this wasn’t real labor. It’s not that much water. Maybe my bladder quit on me?