face, and another grainier one of me taking that selfie that I’d sent to Lacey in front of the Kensington Palace gift shop.
I cleared my throat. “I meant to tell you.”
“I thought I was done getting Bex Bombs from Clive, but evidently not,” he said.
“Clive sent these?” I asked. “How did he…is he stalking me?”
Nick shrugged. “They could have come from a source,” he said. “He didn’t include any exposition.”
“I took a dumb risk,” I said, forcing myself not to bite any of my nails.
“I don’t think he can do anything with them,” Nick said. “They don’t look like you, and he’s got no proof. I think he’s just taunting me. Maybe he knows about Scotland.” He stared down at them again. “Or perhaps he had a keen sense you hadn’t told me.”
“Finally, I get the two brothers together,” I heard Daphne say, and turned to see her approaching with Freddie glued to her side. “You two have done yeoman’s work tonight dividing and conquering the room.”
“All part of the job,” Nick said.
“Oi, Bex, congratulations on the baby,” said Freddie, with a smile at us so convincing even I almost forgot it was an act. “You don’t look pregnant, but perhaps you’re carrying it all in your sleeves.”
“Cute,” I said. “But it’s not polite to comment on a woman’s sleeves.”
“A thousand apologies, madam,” Freddie said. “What’s Knickers so glum about?” Freddie pulled a jovial face and went around to peer over Nick’s shoulder. “Ah, hello, Margot.” He looked up at me. “I thought you said no one recognized you.”
Nick’s hand fell to his side. “When did she say that?”
“Right after she fell through the wall in the billiard room.” Freddie looked sideways at me. “Or did you…not tell him that part.”
“She didn’t tell me any part,” Nick said.
A look of comprehension passed across Daphne’s face. “Freddie, is that older man trying to smuggle out a fork?” she asked, grabbing his hand. “We’d better investigate.”
“Smooth,” I said to their retreating backs.
“But not wrong,” Nick said. “That’s Annabelle’s husband. He’s got the stickiest fingers in England. Gran was always watching him.”
“Nick.”
I reached for his hand. He avoided my touch. “Aha, and there’s Annabelle. I didn’t see her come in.”
“Nick, listen to me,” I said. “I’d been punchy and bored, and you were so busy that I was embarrassed to say, ‘Hey, honey, have fun at work, can I please take a PPO and go get a Big Mac?’”
“I’m not your keeper, Bex,” he said. “Please don’t treat me that way. You don’t need my permission.”
I let out a frustrated breath. “I’m pretty sure I do. We don’t get to be spontaneous anymore without a little subterfuge. I bumped into Freddie by accident when I was sneaking back in, and he kept the secret to be nice.”
“And why did you keep it?” he asked.
“So it’s not what I did that bothers you,” I translated. “It’s that Freddie knew it first.”
Nick’s jaw tensed.
“And that is why I didn’t tell you,” I said. “After Thanksgiving, under those circumstances, I knew it would blow up even though it was really nothing.”
“Somehow, at every turn, there is something between you two that I don’t know,” he said softly. “That’s not trivial to me.”
“This is nothing like that, Nick. This was fast food and an accident.”
“Keeping secrets always makes the truth look like a smokescreen,” he said.
He started to walk away and then turned back and was about to say something else when Richard called for him to come discuss the next day’s Parliament visit with Hax and Lax and Doris Tuesday, who appeared to have accordion-pleated her linen napkin and forgotten to put it down. Her unease was obvious, and I wondered if my own was, as well.
Transparency is a sign of weakness, I imagined Eleanor saying, and in fact, she probably had said it once. To my astonishment, I missed her. The Queen didn’t like me, and I couldn’t rightly say I liked her, either. But I had a very specific value to her, and since I’d stopped being called to her quarters to be lectured or stared at or instructed, I hadn’t felt that value anywhere else. Certainly not with her son, who had not only declined to employ me but had restricted Eleanor’s visitors to only immediate family—which, he made clear, meant only blood relatives. But if this next phase of my life was about trying to find my place in all this, I was going to follow my internal compass wherever it pointed—and