would loom less scary to me if I reduced him to something more human, more fallible, by picturing him as he was before: Nick’s childhood friend, the kind and flirty guy I’d met at Oxford who’d been a hapless but hungry local reporter, writing about Tube station loos and the nun who claimed to see the Virgin Mary in a pancake, rather than a person who’d attempted to blackmail me.
But my mind’s eye couldn’t see that Clive anymore; all I could conjure was the bitter, twisted Clive who’d vibrated with spite when he confronted me and Nick about his claims that Freddie and I were having an affair. He was fueled by a lifetime of buried resentment and throttled hate. What did that Clive, the only Clive who would ever exist for me now, think he was doing emailing me?
My worst impulses won out, and I Googled him. He had tucked into his new gig with vigor: THE CHEAT, THE CAD, AND THE CUCKOLD, one of his headlines read, as if he were telling a bad joke over a whiskey. I snorted derisively.
I knew I should stop reading. But on the internet, you are only ever a few easy clicks from a horror show, and I could not turn away from mine. One story about Freddie at the opening of a distillery had me studying his face again for signs of stress, and that led me to an older one theorizing that he was drowning his sorrows in socialites. Another click took me to a report that Queen Eleanor might exile us. The tabloids had pulled whatever photos they had of me and Freddie and turned their body-language experts loose to find proof that he was checking me out, or vice versa. I fell further and further down the wormhole, all the way back to those grainy early morning photos of Freddie leaving my apartment, which Clive had used to bolster his claim of an affair. Eventually, I landed on the BBC’s video of my entire wedding—right down to its abysmal end. I’d never seen it. Why would I have? I’d lived it.
I hit play.
Everything started out brilliantly. The commentators lapped up the décor, swooned over my dress, and—in a twist of dramatic irony I would find delicious if it were on one of my soap operas—extolled me as a perfect future queen.
“She looks stunning,” the BBC lip-reader caught Freddie saying to Nick as I came up the aisle. “You’re a lucky man.”
(That explained the headline of one of Clive’s pieces from the aftermath, ‘LUCKY NICK,’ SAYS TRICKY PRICK.)
You could pinpoint the second the news broke, even before the lead commentator’s sharp intake of breath. Nick and I had emerged from signing the register behind the altar when, amid the choir’s gorgeous elegy to our love, a light murmur started to creep through the Abbey.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the commentator said, “we’ve received word of the most astonishing story…”
As I curtsied to the Queen, you could see from above how many people had ignored the directive to switch off their cell phones. Their screens lit up one after the other, sweeping like fire all the way down the pews of the church, apace with the realization I remembered washing over me with every step toward the Abbey door: Clive had called our bluff. Or maybe we’d called his.
Reflexively, I hit mute to see, rather than hear, the next part. Incredibly, our veneer never visibly faltered. If you had somehow missed the headline OPEN-DOOR DUCHESS: BEX SCANDAL BLINDSIDES BUCKINGHAM, or slept on the Mirror’s poetic FREDDIE NICKS NICK’S BRIDE, then you’d have assumed our happy ending was delivered on schedule. The newly minted duke and duchess, who seemed a lifetime removed from me and Nick even though it had been only about six weeks, emerged into the soundless streets of London as if nothing were the matter. We waved. We held hands. As we climbed into the carriage and began the journey to Buckingham Palace through what were meant to be adoring crowds, Nick even held mine aloft and kissed it. He had suffered the most in all this and yet he’d been the perfect gentleman. As a silent film, it was flawless.
But with the sound on…
Nick poked his head into the bedroom, and I stabbed at the pause button. “Ready yet? I’ve got the picnic packed.” He studied my face. “You look pale. Are you feeling all right?”
“Nothing a little vitamin D won’t fix,” I said, smiling as brightly as I