“We need this wedding now more than ever,” Robert chimed in.
Beatrice glanced helplessly from one of them to the other. “I get that, but—I mean—Teddy and I haven’t known each other very long.”
Queen Adelaide shifted. “Beatrice. Are you having second thoughts about marrying Teddy?”
Beatrice looked down at the engagement ring on her left hand. She’d been wearing it all month, out of inertia more than anything. When Teddy had first given it to her, it had felt wrong, but at some point she must have gotten used to it. It proved that you could get used to anything, really, in time.
The ring was beautiful, a solitaire diamond on a white-gold band. It had originally belonged to Queen Thérèse over a hundred years ago, though it had been polished so expertly that any damage was hidden beneath all the sparkle.
A little like Beatrice herself.
She realized that Robert and her mom were both waiting for her reply. “I just…I miss Dad.”
“Oh, sweetheart. I know.” A tear escaped her mom’s eye, trailing mascara forlornly down her cheek.
Queen Adelaide never wept—at least, not where anyone could see. Even at the funeral she’d locked her emotions behind a pale, resolute stoicism. She’d always told Beatrice that a queen had to shed her tears in private, so that when it came time to face the nation, she could be a source of strength. The sight of that tear was as startling and surreal as if one of the marble statues in the palace gardens had begun to weep.
Beatrice hadn’t been able to cry since her father’s death, either.
She wanted to cry. She knew it was unnatural, yet something in her seemed to have irreparably fractured, and her eyes simply didn’t form tears anymore.
Adelaide wrapped an arm around her daughter to pull her close. Beatrice instinctively tipped her head onto her mom’s shoulder, the way she had as a child. Yet it didn’t soothe her like it used to.
Suddenly, all she noticed was how frail her mom’s bones felt beneath her cashmere sweater. Queen Adelaide was trembling with suppressed grief. She seemed fragile—and, for the first time Beatrice could remember, she seemed old.
It splintered what was left of Beatrice’s resolve.
She tried, one last time, to imagine being with Connor: telling him that she still loved him, that she wanted to run away from her life and be with him, no matter the consequences. But she simply couldn’t picture it. It was as if the future she’d daydreamed about had died with her father.
Or maybe it had died with the old Beatrice, the one who’d been a princess, not a queen.
“All right,” she said quietly. “I’ll talk to Teddy.”
She could do this, for her family, for her country. She could marry Teddy and give America the fairy-tale romance it so desperately needed.
She could let go of Beatrice the girl, and give herself over to Beatrice the queen.
Nina Gonzalez tensed as she drew a wooden block from the increasingly precarious tower. Everyone at the table held their breath. With excruciating care, she placed the Jenga piece atop the makeshift structure.
Somehow, it held.
“Yes!” Nina lifted her hands, letting out a whoop of victory—just as a pair of blocks slid off the stack and clattered to the table. “Looks like I spoke too soon,” she amended with a laugh.
Rachel Greenbaum, who lived down the hall from Nina, swept the fallen blocks toward her. “Look, you got FIND A HAT and CELL BLOCK TANGO!”
They were playing with King’s College’s famous “Party Jenga” set, covered in red Sharpie. It was the same as regular Jenga, except each block was inscribed with a different command—SHOTSKI, KARAOKE, BUTTERFINGERS—and everyone had to follow the rules of whatever blocks they knocked down. When Nina had asked how old the Jenga set was, no one knew.
It was the last weekend of spring break, and Nina’s friends were hanging out in Ogden, the café and lounge area beneath the fine arts building. Because of its location, Ogden mostly attracted the theater kids, which had always surprised Nina, since it served cookies for free.
“FIND A HAT is easy. You just wear some object as if it’s a hat,” explained their other friend Leila Taghdisi. Nina obediently folded a paper napkin into a triangle before setting it on her head.
“And for CELL BLOCK TANGO, you have to leave your phone out for the rest of the game so we can all read your texts.” Leila shot Nina an apologetic glance. Her friends knew how private Nina was about her personal life—and her relationship with the royal family.
But Nina had resolved that this semester she would be normal. So, like any normal college student, she pulled out her phone and set it on the table.
Rachel sighed. “I can’t believe our first day of spring quarter is on Monday. I’m nowhere near ready for the start of classes.”
“I don’t know, I’m kind of glad to be back.” Nina was actually excited about school again, now that she could walk around campus without being tailed by paparazzi. She still garnered a whisper here or there—still occasionally saw her fellow students looking at her for a beat too long, their brows furrowed in confusion, as if they thought they’d met her but couldn’t remember where.
But it was a massive improvement over the nightmare she’d been living earlier this year, when she was dating Prince Jefferson.
People had remarkably short memories for this sort of thing. And after the earth-shattering, world-altering news of the king’s death, Nina’s brief relationship with Jeff was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The world had clearly forgotten her and moved on, to Nina’s immense relief.
“Not me. I never wanted to leave Virginia Beach,” Leila chimed in. “If we were still there, we’d be out on the sand right now, watching the sunset and eating Nina’s addictive guacamole.”
“It’s my mamá’s recipe. The secret is in the garlic,” Nina explained.
She was so grateful that Rachel had dragged her on that trip. It was nothing like the vacations Nina had gone on as a guest of the Washingtons: the rental house had been run-down, with no air-conditioning, and she’d had to sleep on a sofa in the living room. Yet she’d loved it. Sitting there with the other girls on her hall, drinking cheap beer and telling stories over a beach bonfire, had felt infinitely more satisfying than all the five-star royal travel.
“Sadly, I can’t offer you guacamole.” Jayne, another of their friends, emerged from the café’s kitchen, balancing a tray in her oven mitts. “But these might help.”
The three girls immediately tore into the cookies. “Have I mentioned how glad I am that you work here?” Nina asked.