her for a walk by the sea, I ducked into the adjacent sunroom to wait. Three walls were windows, and the fourth was covered with framed family snapshots, as if surrounding Emma with where she came from might bring her back to who she was. There was chubby toddler Nick, holding baby Freddie; a fading Polaroid of teenage Richard and Agatha at what looked like Ascot; Nick and Freddie with Richard on Freddie’s first day at Eton; and a photo that I knew was from Nick’s twentieth birthday trip to Mustique, because I spied a bandaged Gaz lurking in the background (he’d legendarily been bitten by a turtle that he described as “a dynamic half-shark”). There was an entire life on that wall, so much of it stolen from Emma before she could live it.
“Oh, good, I’ve found you,” Lesley said, poking her head into the room. “Can you have His Highness return this to his father? Usually he makes sure to collect them all but this one had fallen on the floor.”
She handed me a piece of paper, and then left as fast as she’d come. I turned it around in my hands, in wonderment. It was—or would be, if Richard ever finished it—a stunning watercolor of Emma as she faced out the window, a wisp of a smile playing on her face in a way I’d often seen on Nick’s. She had been rendered more present than she actually was, as if Richard was imagining her in that other life, where she’d made other choices. The detail with which he’d captured the lines of her face and the way she propped up her chin on her palm…there were feelings in every brush stroke. Maybe this was the one way he felt he could express them. When Nick came back from his walk, I wordlessly handed the painting to him.
“Crikey,” was all he said.
“This isn’t the work of someone who doesn’t care,” I said. “For whatever that’s worth. But I think it should be worth quite a lot.”
He put down the paper and slid his hands around my waist. “You are worth quite a lot,” he said. “And now that I’m going to live in the open where you’re concerned, I want to do it with everything. Even Mum. It’s time. It’s decades past time.”
Just saying that out loud seemed to release him from an invisible grip.
“I thought I couldn’t face it. But now I know that I was just waiting for the right person to face it with,” he explained. “I always thought the press was her worst enemy, but really, it was a perfect storm of the wrong husband, the wrong support system, the wrong life.”
He backed away a step. “And I will not be the wrong husband, nor the wrong support system, nor will I give you the wrong life.”
My head got very light as he dropped to one knee.
“I always told myself this could wait until I was older,” Nick said with a nervous, crooked smile. “But it’s stupid to pretend for another day that this isn’t it for me. I love you, Bex. My soul married yours that first night at Windsor, and while I’ll be the king of this country someday, every day I will be your servant.”
And then he fished a ring box out of his pocket.
A tear slid down my cheek as he opened it to reveal a flamboyantly plastic affair, with a red stone whittled faintly into a heart shape and clamped atop a muted olive-gold band.
“It’s from the first Cracker Jack box we ate in Oxford,” he said. “Somehow I ended up with it. I thought…I thought your father would approve.”
“He does,” I said thickly. “Wherever he is.”
“There would be a real ring eventually, of course,” he said, slipping the cartoonish bauble on my finger. It fit horribly. It was perfect. “But if you’ll kindly agree to marry me, I will drive us home so fast to celebrate that Popeye will have to bribe some policemen. Please, love. Say yes.”
Nick looked up at me, his eyes wet with more love than I ever thought I would be allotted in this lifetime.
It was the easiest answer I have ever given.
He wrapped me in his arms, and time was briefly lost to us as we shared, if not the most passionate kiss of the weekend, undoubtedly the sweetest. And then we joined hands, wordlessly, and walked out into the sun, blithely unaware that there could ever again be darkness.