Nick laughed. “I’m going to consider that a homework assignment,” he said.
The charge only had about fifteen minutes in it—Nick said the phones were bricks from the nineties—but those fifteen minutes rebuilt me as if they were fifteen days, and when we hung up, I was awash in love and guilt and a renewed strength. I don’t know why it takes something monumentally destructive to remind you what you want to save. This was not the life I would have chosen, but Nick would always be the person. And if I couldn’t take back the night that brought me to that epiphany, I would give him the greatest show of commitment I had at my fingertips. So I ran to the living room and shuffled through the magazines and the tabloids and the other detritus of my self-containment, until I found the oath of renunciation. Nick loved me enough to go up against Eleanor on this, but I loved him enough not to make him—to do the one thing I knew would mean the most to his grandmother and to his country. I wanted them all to know that as far as I was concerned, he, and we, were worth every sacrifice. I picked up a pen, muttered the Pledge of Allegiance one last time, and signed the papers. I was all in with Nick once more, and it was a gamble I might be about to lose.
Part Five
Present Day
“In my end is my beginning.”
—Mary, Queen of Scots
Chapter One
I did something.”
Standing in my hotel room, one day before what’s supposed to be the most exciting moment of my family’s life, Lacey looks wan and haggard. Her normally bouncy blond hair is limp and brittle at the ends, as if the life has been sanded out of it by her thumb and forefinger—a telltale sign she’s been freaking out. That makes two of us.
“I did something, too,” I say. “But I think you already knew that.”
I throw my phone onto the bed beside where she’s standing.
TIME IS RUNNING OUT.
When she sees all the texts, her breath catches; clearly she’d hoped to get to me first. I try not to feel sympathy, even though her anguish looks genuine. I want to get through this without feeling anything at all, if possible. But the longer Lacey is silent, the angrier I am. I shouldn’t have to go first, but she can’t seem to muster the words—whereas I have a thousand of them right now, none of them polite, and I’m scared to open my mouth in case they all tumble out at the same time.
As usual, my mouth opens anyway.
“Do you hate me this much?”
“No,” Lacey says emphatically.
“Then how could you?” This is supposed to sound coolly accusatory, but it comes out wounded.
“How could you?” she fires back.
“It isn’t what you think,” I insist.
“How do you know what I think?”
“Well, I guess I’ll read all about it when Clive publishes your tell-all,” I snap. “The Royal Flush himself, finally flushing me. How long have you been in on his sleazy little game?”
“I wasn’t! He tricked me into it!” she said.
“Bullshit. He can’t have pulled this off overnight,” I said. “He’s been going at us anonymously for nine months now. You haven’t spoken to me in almost that long. You expect me to believe those two things aren’t connected?”
Lacey closes her eyes. “They’re not,” she insists. “All I did was trust him. You can’t expect me to have figured out he’s a shithead if you never did.”
“Even so,” I say, “the only person you should have talked to about any of this was me. And you know that. Which makes me think you hit the self-destruct button on purpose.” My voice cracks. “Why are you even here? To gloat? I saw the photo you left for me. Why didn’t you give that to Clive, too?”
Her lip trembles. “I love that picture. It was a peace offering,” she says.
“Funny,” I say, pointing wildly at my phone, “because that feels like war.”
We are both trying to keep our voices down so the Bex Brigade doesn’t hear anything.
“Why does he say he’s got proof, Lace?” I demand. “What kind of hard proof could he possibly have, of any of this? What don’t I know?”
Lacey swallows hard. “I’m on tape,” she says. “The proof is me.”
“Don’t worry, Cilla, they won’t mind. We have no secrets,” we hear, and then Mom charges through the door. “Ah, here we go. What a sight for sore eyes,” she says, clicking it shut behind her. “I knew you two wouldn’t let a little disagreement ruin the—”
Her voice trails off as she notices Lacey and me trying and failing to arrange our faces into casual expressions, all while barely looking at her and not at all looking at each other.
“So you’re not hugging this out,” she says, Fancy Nancy immediately back on the shelf. She looks so pretty in her green suit, some of the optimism not yet having drained from her face. “This cannot just be about Paris. What’s really going on?”
Lacey and I turn away from each other. We are silent. Mom crosses her arms.
“Out with it, or I will get Barnes and Marj in here,” she says.
Lacey looks at me, as if it’s my job to run this show. This irritates me just enough that I do it—which of course is classic Lacey.
“Freddie and I kissed,” I blurt. “And I gather Lacey saw it and told Clive, and now he’s blackmailing me for insider information on the Royal Family. Like, indefinitely. Or else.”
At the word blackmail, the color drains from my mother’s face. At or else, she sways.
“If this is some kind of prank,” she says thinly, “it’s not funny.”
“No, it’s not funny,” I say. “She stabbed me in the back.”
“Look who’s talking, Killer,” Lacey says.
“I told you, it wasn’t—”
“Oh, right, as if—”
“Girls.” Mom’s tone makes us twelve years old again. She gropes like a blinded woman to the armchair in the corner and sits down, blinking. “When did this happen?”
“A couple of months ago.”
“And Clive knows.” Mom looks at Lacey. “And Clive is bad.”
“Yesssss,” Lacey says, stretching the word with dread.
Mom sighs. “Oh, Earl, give me strength.”
This nearly ruins me. Dad would be so disappointed in both of us. Lacey and I scowl at each other in the manner of two people trying to transfer as much shame as possible onto the other person so that their own will sting less. It doesn’t work; it never does.
“I think you’d better tell me everything. And I mean everything,” Mom says.
I nod, although I’m scared of what Lacey is going to say. The situation is already really ugly, and I only know the half of it.
“I’ll start this time,” Lacey says, climbing up onto the bed and crossing her legs. She looks nervous, too. “The night of Gaz and Cilla’s wedding, I was at a club, and I got a call from Clive. Actually, it was an S.O.S. text first, but then he called a bunch, and because I was a little tipsy, I was pretty sure this meant Bex was dead in a ditch.”