are we even doing here?” I shoved away my plate. “Maybe I should go to Iowa. Or you should go to Cornwall. When was the last time you spent Christmas Day with your mom?”
Nick blinked. “You’re kicking me out?”
“No!” I said, exasperated. “I’m making a suggestion. Any suggestion at all. This isn’t going great, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Nick pulled on his hair. “What kind of man leaves his wife on their first married Christmas?”
“Someone whose wife told him to,” I said. “Look, things suck here right now. And I know you’re always pulled in two directions on holidays, so let this be one time you’re not. Consider it a Christmas gift.”
“But what are you going to do?”
I shrugged. “What have I been doing for the last few weeks, besides decorating? It’ll be like that, but without you snoring on your office couch.”
He looked sad. “I would really love to see her.”
“I’m not stopping you,” I said. “Get out of here, already. Go.”
He did.
* * *
“What’s the time?” yawned Marta.
I glanced at my watch. “Eleven forty-five,” I said. “Not long now.”
I had to give Marta credit. The only New Year’s Eve on which my dad stayed awake past midnight, we’d forced the issue with a 10:45 p.m. dinner reservation, but Marta, well into her eleventh decade, had been remarkable. She’d noodled around on her phone, given a lot of feedback to the various guests on Graham Norton (she did not care for the cut of Will Ferrell’s jib), and even hummed along to the Bryan Adams concert that would bookend the fireworks over London. All while avoiding asking me anything overtly personal.
“Why the hell is your husband at a party without you?” she asked. “You’re too young to be spending New Year’s Eve watching telly with an old woman.”
I guess it was only a matter of time.
“He’s…” I searched for a lie. “He needed to stay down in Cornwall for scheduling reasons.”
“So he’s avoiding you,” Marta said. “I don’t miss a trick.”
Nick had made a beeline for his mother’s serene seaside home, and then…stayed there. The week between Christmas and New Year’s was traditionally quiet for the royals, but Nick must have asked Richard to keep him busy, because two engagements in that neck of the woods suddenly found their way onto his diary. He communicated this only in the most basic of texts, giving me a hearty dose of what it must have been like for everyone else during our summer of hiding; I felt disregarded and terrible, and retroactively ashamed of myself.
Now, on New Year’s Eve, he’d used geography as an excuse to keep hiding. He’d attended vespers at the abbey in Bath, then “decided to make an appearance” at Annabelle Farthing’s bash.
Off south again to Portsmouth in the morning, he’d texted me. Makes sense to use one of her guest rooms and stay off the roads.
It didn’t escape my notice that he hadn’t invited me to join him. Neither had Annabelle. Worse than that, though, was that it wouldn’t have been that impractical, or taken much effort, for Nick to come home. He just must not have wanted to. Not enough. When I told him to go, I hadn’t realized I needed to worry about whether he’d come back.
Marta poked at me with her cane. “I assume it’s to do with Frederick,” she said. She tapped her temple. “You all think I don’t see things because I’m old, but I could tell. It’s not my first foxtrot, you know.”
“How did you deal with it?” I asked. “With Eleanor and Georgina, I mean.”
She looked at me sharply. “Eh?”
“The journals I found,” I said. “In their girlhood, she and Eleanor come off like Nick and Freddie, a bit. They were clearly very close. But it obviously didn’t stay that way. What happened?”
Marta’s expression grew distant. I had forgotten to consider whether it was too painful to discuss her daughters this way, given that she’d long outlived one, and might yet survive the other. But then she spoke.
“It wasn’t easy when we realized Eleanor was going to be queen,” she said. “Heavy is the head, and all that. Georgina is little more than a footnote now, and I wonder…” She closed her eyes. “Some wounds are too deep to heal.”
We sat in silence, which I thought was both of us processing this until I realized she’d fallen back asleep a few minutes shy of midnight. I wondered what alternate reality Marta had been thinking about; I’d been busy resisting quizzing