wonder if the alternative would have been easier.” She looked up at Nick. “Are you ready for that? Do you think you can live out this choice without regrets?”
Nick gazed at his grandmother, his smile rueful but resigned. “No one lives without regrets, really,” he said. “But when they surface, and I’m sure they will, I just have to remember that I’m doing this for something bigger.” He glanced at the baby in his arms. “And something much smaller. The same way you did.”
“My darling, darling boy,” she said. “Thank you.”
She looked over at the baby Nick held, and then down at the one in her arms. Then she cleared her throat and turned to me. “Rebecca, there’s something I need to tell you,” she said. “I realize I abused our relationship by telling you a very specific version of the truth, but it’s important to me that you know the relationship itself was not a lie.” She took a moment, and cleared her throat. “You matter to me very much.”
I smiled at her, there in her signature dress and topper, holding my firstborn daughter, her latest-born heir. “I love you, too,” I told her.
“Also, no one else is interested in my thoughts about the Cubs bullpen. Murray simply cannot grasp it,” she said, sounding put out about it. “We need to get these babies home and start teaching them about managing your middle relievers.”
“Yes, it’s high time we all moved forward,” Nick said. “In that vein, Gran, Bex and I have decided to pack up Georgina’s writings. All of them. We’ll have Bea personally deliver the box this week.”
She blinked. “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to burn them?” she asked.
Nick shrugged. “They’re yours, not ours. It’s your story, yours and Father’s. Neither one of you got to write the beginning of it. It only seems fair that you be allowed to write the end.”
The baby reached out and grabbed Eleanor’s finger. Eleanor cooed at her, then pursed her lips. “Whether or not the proof dies with me,” she said, “the truth doesn’t have to. When these ladies are old enough to understand your decision, you have my blessing to offer it to them. Although I would certainly hate to deny the world…”
She looked expectantly at me and Nick. I glanced at him, and he nodded.
“Nick is holding Margaret Eleanor Mary,” I said.
“And you, Gran, are holding our future queen, Georgina Emma Victoria,” Nick said. “It felt right. I hope you agree.”
Eleanor’s lips trembled. “It is absolutely right.” A tear trickled down her cheek. “History has all but forgotten her. Perhaps now, it never will.”
She gently began rocking the chair, then looked up with a start as Georgina burped in her face. Eleanor’s expression relaxed into a chortle, and Nick joined her in it, both of their faces at peace in a way that had been missing since we’d opened that box. Georgie was named both for the beloved queen that was—whose death during World War I gave all the Lyons heirs their name—and for the one who never got to be, who’d loved her child enough to let a secret tear her to shreds. Maggie bore Eleanor’s name as a tribute to the strongest woman I have ever known, a talisman to help her navigate the twist of being born second—one slender minute that would someday feel monumental to them both. They carried everything and yet nothing at all on the shoulders of their five-pound bodies.
As I watched them nestled in the arms of a queen and of a king in waiting, I sent up a fervent wish that they would lean on each other for the rest of their lives, the way Georgina and Eleanor couldn’t. Unlike the heirs and spares before them, though, they would always have us. Nick and I had taken some blows, self-inflicted and otherwise, and somehow emerged unbroken—forged in fire, fiercely in love, and ready to fight for our daughters. These girls, these women in waiting, wouldn’t repeat history. They would make it.
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Acknowledgments
It’s a lucky thing to write a book, luckier still to have someone read it and not hurl it at a wall, and an absolute blessing when people finish it and want to spend more time with its characters. We are so grateful for you, the readers, who took Bex and Nick and Freddie—and Gaz, always Gaz—into your hearts and didn’t let go.