When Nick and I got engaged, a newspaper column claimed I’d come to Oxford to sweep Nick off his feet as a way of legitimizing my father’s fridge-furniture empire to the world—which is patently absurd, not least because the Coucherator was already the top-selling appliance in Luxembourg. The truth is, I rarely thought about Nick at first, and saw him even less. He’d been absent from communal meals in the Dining Hall, and wasn’t particularly gregarious during passing encounters in the hallway. I got more information from the papers than from living with him: There was a story about him spending his reclusive mother’s birthday with her at Prince Richard’s country estate, Trewsbury House, complete with grainy photos of him exchanging a terse-looking handshake with his father (NICK AND DICK: NOT SO THICK? the headline wondered); and a gossipy tidbit claiming he’d gotten his teeth whitened after an heiress named Davinia snubbed his summer advances because she thought they were too yellow. Clive, who seemed to relish having the inside scoop, dissected these for me at length whenever we walked to lunch or the market (he swore Nick’s teeth were lighter). I knew Lacey was dying of curiosity from her room at Cornell, so I dutifully listened for repeatable tidbits, but frankly, I had other priorities. The first of which involved giving Lady Bollocks no reason to poison my Weetabix.
And the second of which should have been school, but this was my first trip overseas, and everything outside academia felt so much more alluring to me: the identical array of gothic arches on the Bodleian Library; the Bridge of Sighs, an ornate, arcing enclosure gracefully connecting two parts of Hertford College; the snarky gargoyles atop the spire of the town’s biggest church. They begged to be sketched, and I answered whenever I could, often in the peaceful, chilly morning hours when I could pick a spot and let the town wake up around me. Drawing has always taken me out of my own head. At Oxford, it helped me be in the moment completely, instead of wondering what Lacey was up to, or which baseball announcers were bugging Dad the most. Despite how welcoming most people had been, I missed my family. I missed knowing which way to look before crossing the street. I missed network TV and American football and the way Diet Coke tastes in the States. But with a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of me, I’m home.
On the last morning of First Week, I got up predawn and headed across the street to Christ Church. Ostensibly I wanted to draw the glow of sunrise over the college’s meadow, all wild grass and pastured cows and squawking geese, but the Iowan in me also itched to stretch her legs, and my body demanded cardiovascular activity to offset the noble sport of drinking I’d undertaken. I started down the mud-and-gravel trail, under the canopy of tall, spiky trees whose leaves were preparing for their seasonal suicide leap, and snaked around the river—blissfully alone with my sketchbook and my thoughts, interrupted only by the occasional bark of the coxswain and the rhythmic splash of the crew team’s oars reaching me through the mist. The road led me past a quaint folly bridge arching over the Isis that would fit perfectly into a series I was doing on the curves of Oxford. I hopped off the path and scrambled around the wooded edge in search of a flat rock to sit on, so lost in trying not to fall over a tree’s root that instead I tripped over the outstretched legs of a man in a hooded sweatshirt. I let out a shrill yelp and he leapt to his feet, knocking over his light and landing in a weird defensive position.
“Shit!” he said.
I squinted at him. “Nick?”
In that instant, the hood on his sweatshirt slipped to reveal his face still frozen in a comical O of surprise. He had been sitting on a plaid blanket, surrounded by papers and books, as if he were on the quad at Pembroke in the afternoon and not a clammy field at dawn. Unsure what to do, I bent to pick up one of the papers strewn about the grass, which had flipped and scattered when he jumped.
“Are you doing a crossword?” I asked, bemused. “It’s barely even light out.”
Nick gave a shy I’m busted shake of the head, and pushed back his hood completely. He was pink-cheeked. “Yeah, the Times cryptic,” he said.
“Cryptic is one word for this,” I agreed.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
It occurred to me, as his breath normalized, that he might’ve thought I’d followed him.
“I’m just on a run,” I explained, gesturing feebly to my athletic clothes and earth-splattered shins. “Well, more of an, um, art jog. I came out to sketch.” Then I froze. “Am I in someone’s crosshairs right now?”
Nick relaxed. “You’ve not been shot yet, so that’s a good sign,” he said. “I’ll have them drop their weapons if you can answer a clue or two. It’s all tricks and wordplay and it’s impossible.” He handed me a printed sheet and pointed to one. “Like this. ‘New pay cut with Post Office work is loony.’ Gibberish.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m still trying to figure out why your salacious secret life outside Pembroke involves word puzzles,” I said. “It’s not very scandalous.”
“It would be if anyone ever saw how blank these are.” Nick sighed, taking back the crossword. “Freddie is brilliant at them, and he goads me about it. So I have to practice in private until I’m respectably competent. Someday I am going to finish one before he does.”
“And this is your only way to do it in peace, because you don’t ever really get to be alone,” I said, not realizing until too late that I’d worked this out aloud.
Nick looked surprised, but pleasantly. “The PPOs and I have a pact—they let me lose them once a week, and I pretend not to know that they followed me here anyway,” he said. “As long as I’ve no idea where they are, I mostly forget about them.”
“Well, I should leave you to it, then,” I said. “I don’t want to step all over your one moment of privacy.”
He dropped back down onto the blanket. “Oh, don’t go racing away on my account. I’ve got loads of coffee to share and you look like you need it.”
“What, no morning tea?”
“I am going to tell you something extremely dramatic that would rock the monarchy to the core,” Nick said, opening the Thermos and pouring into the lid. “I am not a fan of tea. Gran keeps insisting that I’m simply not drinking it properly. After a while I gave in and told her she was right. It is not worth it to argue with the Queen about her PG Tips.”
“So your secret perversions are crosswords and coffee,” I said, settling in beside him and taking the steaming cup. “Truly depraved.”
“My father would agree with you.” But that time he wasn’t smiling.
“My dad and I once had a fight because I refuse to put ketchup on my hot dogs,” I said.