Nick hadn’t taken much of a beating, pun intended, for his fisticuffs with Gaz. Their cover had either worked, or Mustache’s colleagues played along with the party line to avoid a blacklisting, and the public forgot about the set-to as soon as something more interesting happened—like Prince Edwin’s wife Elizabeth delivering a “premature” baby boy seven-ish months after the wedding, whose weight miraculously reached nine pounds by the time he equally miraculously went home three days later. So on the occasion of Freddie’s twenty-fifth birthday, instead of a party the likes of which had been thrown for Nick—if this bothered Freddie, he never said—the boys had agreed to a rare joint appearance on the BBC. Beyond the surface PR objective of showing them grown-up and diligently serving Britain, this interview had a slew of ulterior motives: to remind the public it was rather fond of Nick even if his decision-making was not unimpeachable, and to distract everyone from analyzing Elizabeth’s pregnancy timeline.
Lacey had moved to her own place in South Kensington—she claimed having a roommate cramped her personal life—and because I passed out at geriatric hours these days, I only ever saw her on weekends, if she wasn’t out with Freddie or a shiny new guy. But we’d both agreed that this weeknight special with the Brothers Wales deserved its own private viewing party, bolstered with port wine and a ripe Stilton. While we waited for it to start, she dove into my pile of newspapers.
“Not one report from that film festival in Brixton last night,” she complained.
“Since when are you a fan of…what was it? ‘Gritty Hungarian noir cinema’?” I asked.
“Obviously I don’t care about that,” she said. “But Philip emceed it, and he brought me, and I wore the best green dress. I even gave Clive a heads-up, but nothing.”
Interest in the Ivy League had waned once I stopped making a spectacle of myself, and it hadn’t escaped me that Lacey’s subsequent social choices had the warmth of the spotlight in common. She’d dallied with a lawyer named Maxwell, son of Baron Something-Something; an up-and-coming celebrity chef named Dev; and a footballer who’d immediately fallen off his game, and thus broke up with her before his debut with the Dutch national team. She was now seeing both Penelope Six-Names’s cohost, Philip Frogge-Whitworth (it was a hyphenpalooza on Morning Zoo) and some DJ I could never remember. I didn’t know how she had the energy.
Before I came up with anything ego-soothing to say, a graphic on the TV screen coalesced into the words On Heir with Katie Kenneth. Lacey plonked a massive slice of cheese onto a cracker.
“Do you think they’ll be in suits, or their uniforms?”
“Suits,” I said. “The uniforms are too obvious.”
“I bet you a cocktail it’s uniforms,” she said. “For the full impact.”
We were both right: The hour-long special opened with Freddie and Nick on the job—Lacey sighed audibly when Freddie landed a rescue copter with extreme panache, although I privately thought shooting finger guns at the camera was a bit much—before transitioning into a sit-down interview in which they wore elegant but not ostentatious jackets and ties. Nick was in high spirits (when asked why he hadn’t pursued being a pilot, he cracked, “I can’t fly with a peg leg”) and Freddie was, well, Freddie.
“Think of me as the court jester,” he’d said with a twinkle, when asked about his bad-boy image. “Nick and my father have a heavy responsibility in their futures, and they handle it with care. My job is to get into enough trouble for both of them, to balance the ledger.”
“He makes out like he’s such a gigolo,” Lacey said, crunching through another cracker.
“That’s because he is,” I said.
“Sure, but he’ll come around,” she said. “I think he wants more than just some flavor of the month. Their phones stop ringing eventually. Mine hasn’t.”
I turned to look at her, but she studiously did not meet my gaze.
On TV, the fiftysomething Katie Kenneth asked Nick about Emma—he’d lied, with that long-practiced fa?ade of calm, that she was helping them choose charities for their patronage—before segueing into a line of questioning that I was surprised had been approved.
“You’ve been linked with Gemma Sands, Ceres Whitehall de Villency, and even American Rebecca Porter,” Katie said, frowning as if this were as vital as a conversation about genocide. “We’re all hungering for a royal wedding. Are you game?”
“Ugh,” I said to the TV.
But Nick simply laughed charmingly. “Are you proposing to me, Katie?”
“Please. Everyone knows I’m the real catch,” Freddie said.
“You know I don’t usually comment on this,” Nick said pleasantly. “But I will say that I can’t simply decide I want a wedding and plug in the first bride that appears. I take my military duties seriously. I take my royal duties seriously. And I take commitment to another person seriously, as she’d be my partner for life and beside me at the helm of the country someday. I want to make the right choice, and that cannot be rushed.”
“That was well done,” Lacey said.
“Beats ‘ask me in a decade.’” I couldn’t pretend that didn’t still sting.
“And I know it’s tempting to speculate, and to track and trace the movements of the women who are important to me,” Nick continued. “But I would like to ask the public and the press to show them some mercy. I accept what comes with my birthright for myself, but I don’t have to accept it for them. I cannot brook with a person being made to feel unsafe simply for having cared about me.”
As he looked full into the camera at the end, I swear I felt his eyes on me, and in a flash, mine were wet.
“He’s a class act, that one,” Lacey said, then heaved a comical sigh. “I wish he would have given them the all-clear to hound me, though. I have much cuter clothes than I used to, and, like, hi, give some love to a girl who puts on heels to go to Tesco.”
She stood and brushed cracker crumbs onto my carpet. “Come on, we officially owe each other a drink.”
I shook my head. “I have an early staff meeting tomorrow. And I still don’t think I’m fully detoxed from the first year of being single.”
Lacey eyed me suspiciously. “You never did tell me what made you decide to dry out.”
Our psychic twin abilities had dissipated a bit lately, but she still knew I was withholding something, and she didn’t like it. But Paris was too dangerously juicy. Clive and I had only even discussed it to reassert that we would never discuss it. I certainly didn’t want to relive it, and he needed to keep Davinia loyal, given that her entire life was one long roster of connections he still hoped to leverage for his own column at the Recorder (although so far he’d produced only biased profiles, buried in the middle of the paper, of her father’s rich friends and their self-indulgent charity efforts, like a benefit for something called the British Association for the Proliferation of Philanthropic Events—M. C. Escher fecklessly reinterpreted). No, the truth of Paris was nonnegotiable, even with Lacey. Maybe especially with her. Because I couldn’t swear she wouldn’t whisper it to Freddie, and that was like telling the town crier.
“My liver begged for mercy,” I said instead. It was close enough.
“Very funny,” Lacey said. “You’re going to waste your prime years if you don’t get back on the party horse at least a little. Come on. For me? For the Ivy League?”
“Lace, he just asked the press to lay off,” I said. “I will look like a total jackass if I run right out and tempt them into a chase.”
Lacey fell back against the couch cushions and crossed her arms over her chest. “I miss my partner in crime,” she said petulantly. “We don’t live together and now we don’t have much of a life together, either.”