throat. “Anyway,” I said. “Lady Elizabeth almost named the baby Eldrick, which she thought would be a nice tribute to you, but Agatha talked her into Peter.”
“Remind me to give Agatha a little bauble for that.”
“Richard tried having a goatee for about a week,” I said. Eleanor made a disgusted face. “Agatha talked him out of that, too. No one saw it.”
Eleanor tapped her chin. “Perhaps a medium-size bauble.”
“But Nigel has been wearing a lot of high-fashion sweatpants and everyone has seen those.”
“Foul,” Eleanor said. “Back to the small bauble.”
I turned to Marta for confirmation. “And I heard Edwin finally played a four-letter word in Scrabble?”
“Yes, but the word was word,” Marta said. “Also, Rebecca has done very little of note, Nicholas cried in public, and they’ve still not let Idris Elba be James Bond. If they don’t pony up soon, what will have been the point of my living this long?”
“Nicholas cried?” Eleanor looked astounded. “In front of people?”
“He’d had a rough week,” I hedged.
After our reconciliation, Nick and I were taking it slowly, almost as if we were courting again. We stayed up late eating takeout and watching terrible TV—Nick was heavily invested in Love Island—and snuck over to Lacey and Olly’s flat for a game night. Family business was on a mild pause after Eleanor’s surprise reawakening while everyone figured out what it meant and what it did or didn’t change, so we could afford to hole up and compensate for some of the time together we’d missed. We’d also enlisted Marj to find Nick a therapist, and a day later she got him in with a highly recommended hotshot named Dr. Heath Keplington, so chosen because Marj thought Nick had great female influences in his life but needed to meet a man who knew how to communicate, and also—she admitted this—because he had the name of a soap star and the looks (and locks) of a young Hugh Grant. Nick now mentioned Dr. Kep about six hundred times an hour, so it seemed to be a match made in psychological heaven.
Accordingly, Nick had kept his promise to discuss Freddie with me once we weren’t addled with New Year’s liquor and lust. He’d even brought it up himself, a few nights later, when the two of us were drinking hot chocolate out on the terrace. Snow was in the forecast, and you could smell it; the clouds felt heavy and exciting and full of possibility. We bundled up and sat outside on old plastic beach loungers and turned our faces to the sky, waiting for the flakes to fall, enjoying the romance of the warm drink and the chill on our cheeks.
“This is so relaxing,” Nick said happily. “I missed this feeling.”
“Relaxed looks good on you,” I said, bopping the pom-pom on top of his Cubs knit cap, which tragically he had never been able to wear in public.
“Mum would have loved this,” he said. “It snowed an enormous amount once when we were kids, and we stayed out until well past dark trying to build a snowman. We’d forgotten clothes for him so Freddie went in and grabbed whatever he could find.” He smiled. “Father’s Coldstream Guards hat smelled like a wet dog for a while. Mum had to hide it while it dried out.” Nick’s grin faded. “I wonder if Freddie remembers that.”
I said nothing.
“Thank you for not asking,” Nick said. “I know you want to hear that I’m ready to forgive and forget, but I’m not there yet.” He tipped his face up to the sky. “We had such a good thing, the two of us, and then the three of us, and then he buggered it. Leaving everything else aside, it was so careless and thoughtless and stupid of him to risk all that.”
“But also, you can’t leave everything else aside.”
Nick shook his head. “Dr. Kep thinks this has all changed who Freddie is to me, and that I have to mourn the old him before we can be anything new.”
“Dr. Kep is probably right,” I said to Nick. “And I know it bothers you that Freddie and I still hang out, but—”
“Did you ever consider it?” Nick blurted out.
“Consider what?”
Nick busied himself with retying one corner of the cushion to the chair’s metal frame. “Choosing him,” he said. “I know, I know, you didn’t, but you’ve never told me how hard you had to think about it.”
I looked at him for a second. “We said honesty, so okay, here goes,” I said.