and laid his head in my lap. “I am so sorry I stayed away,” he said. “And I’m sorrier that even when I was here, I wasn’t really here at all.”
“You had a lot on your mind,” I said, unable to resist stroking his hair.
“Bex, am I a…runner-awayer?” he asked. “That cannot be the right word. I wish I hadn’t drunk that last ale.” He sat up to look at me. “We ran away to Scotland. I ran away to Cornwall. I don’t want to be a person who keeps running away from things. But I got spooked. Everything those kids said about their feelings that day at New Mentality are things that I feel, too, sometimes. I couldn’t stop thinking about how they couldn’t stop thinking about whatever they were anxious about, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about how maybe everything I was going through meant that I was headed toward…wherever my Mum is, and then I couldn’t stop thinking that if it happened to me, too, then maybe…” He gulped. “Maybe you chose wrong.”
“Oh, love,” I said, scooting down to the floor with him. “A lot of people are depressed or have anxiety and it doesn’t go to that place. All those kids were doing so much better! That was the whole point of that visit. They were getting help, and it was working.”
“Exactly.” Nick looked serious. “After I spent a few days with Mum, I thought, No. This won’t be me. She didn’t have a choice. But maybe I still do,” he said. “I don’t have the answers, but we are the problem like Maria that I want to solve, and I don’t know how I thought I was supposed to do it alone.”
“You know I can’t resist you when you quote The Sound of Music.”
He sat back on his heels and nearly tipped over. “I miss you. I love you,” he said, steadying himself. “You’re the one thing in my life that I want to choose again and again. We do better together.” He smiled broadly. “And on that tip, I’ve had a brilliant idea, Rebecca.”
“Do tell, Nicholas,” I said, plucking a very sticky eyelash out of my lower lid. “Is my mascara amazing right now?”
“It is all under your eyes. You look like Batman,” he said. “And you might remember from our first Halloween how sexy I find Batman.”
“You were Batman. I was Darth Vader,” I said.
“Yes, and if you recall, I was very sexy,” he said. “But listen. Mum and Father went on a tour of someplace or other right about a year after they got married. I can’t remember where. It would be a better story if I could. But regardless. We should do that. Let’s get out of here and find our Bex and Nick bubble again.”
“But you just said you didn’t want to be a runner-awayer,” I pointed out.
“Aha! This is not running away!” His sense of triumph nearly knocked him over. “We’ve never tried a bubble where we’re also being the Duke and Duchess of Clarence. This bubble wouldn’t be running away from something. We’d be running to something.” He clapped his hands. “It’s the best of both worlds. A fresh start, doing work together that isn’t about deflecting headlines. So we’re on the job, but we can be in a bubble at the same time.” He looked at me hopefully. “It’s worth a shot, yes?”
“It’s worth every shot,” I said. “But we need to talk about Freddie. Part of the problem is that we didn’t talk about him last time.”
Nick looked contemplative. “Let’s do that part when we’re more sober.” He clambered to his feet and hauled me up gracelessly. “I solemnly swear we will not do anything rash, nor leave anything unsaid. Not again. Do we get to kiss yet?”
I took his face in my hands with a wicked grin. When we came up for air, he teased, “I hope this doesn’t scandalize Gran.”
“All due respect to Her Maj, I don’t really care.”
He swept me into another kiss that was interrupted only when Marta shouted out Daniel Craig’s name in her sleep. Nick extracted himself from our embrace to tuck a blanket up around her body, then turned to Eleanor and touched her hand.
“Happy New Year, Gran,” he said.
Eleanor’s eyes flew open and locked on mine.
CHAPTER THREE
History will likely tell it that when Eleanor came back to us, order was restored—that she woke up surrounded by her family, that her indomitable spirit had won the day, that