The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “It wouldn’t be simple. It would be worse,” I said. “You would never forgive yourself, and neither would I. We can’t scorch the earth forever just because we’re unhappy now.”

  Freddie blew out his cheeks and came around and sat next to me on the bed. “I know,” he said. “I think I knew it before I even said it. I shouldn’t have said it. Any of this.” He scratched the back of his head in frustration. “I just thought…I felt something, and maybe you did, too, and this was the last chance to save both of us. And instead I’ve mucked up heroically. God, Bea told me to fix things and I’ve only made them worse.”

  “Well, I helped,” I said. “I’m good at that.”

  “The worst of it is, somewhere in here I think I realized you’re one of my best friends,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Unfortunately it was after that bit with all the kissing.”

  That sat between us for a second.

  “Are you going to tell him?” he asked plainly.

  “I should,” I said. “He deserves the truth.”

  “I won’t ask you to keep this secret,” he said. “Not again, not when you’re getting married and it matters. But part of me thinks it doesn’t matter. Nothing much happened. Nothing is changing.” He looked so sad. “I don’t want to break his heart for nothing. Does that make me a coward?”

  “No,” I said. “It makes you his brother.”

  Our eyes met, and we nodded slowly, as if a decision had silently been made. Then Freddie looked at his watch. “It’s an appalling hour of the morning,” he said. “And I’m not sure how to take my leave after all of this. Bye, thanks for listening, sorry about the tongue? ”

  “How about just, See you later, Killer,” I offered.

  “I know this is strange to say, after what I did,” he said as he stood. “But I’m glad you truly do love him.”

  “Did you ever doubt it?”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Neither did I,” he said. Then his old mischievous gleam surfaced. “Well, maybe for ten very specific seconds.”

  I socked him in the arm. He took it as it was intended.

  “And how about you talk to someone properly next time,” he said. “I know Marj and Barnes and Prince Dick are always railing about whatever you’ve done wrong, but there are plenty of people who like you just as you are. You should remember that when you start feeling like you’re being erased.”

  “I could say exactly the same to you,” I told him.

  Freddie gave me a lovely smile. “You know, I spent the last year telling myself I hadn’t got the girl, but I think I was wrong. In the way I was meant to, perhaps I’ve had her all along.”

  My phone pierced the moment. I frowned at the jumble of numbers on the home screen, and got a prickly feeling in my chest.

  “Bex? Thank God I caught you. I was sure you’d be passed out by now.”

  “Nick!” I gasped, glancing up at Freddie.

  “I think that’s my cue,” Freddie said. I watched him disappear, and in the split second that I processed the melancholic end of whatever this night had been, the scale tipped back in the other direction with a heady rush.

  “Bex? Are you there?” Nick asked. “Our bloody email is on the fritz. I’ve been stewing for weeks until I pulled rank and made them give me a phone.”

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, sensing urgency.

  “It’s about your citizenship,” Nick said. “Did I get to you in time? Don’t do it. Don’t give it up.”

  My eyes fell on my coat, crumpled on the floor, my flag pin there on the lapel. “I can’t believe your timing,” I choked out. “I haven’t done it. Not yet. I—”

  “It isn’t coming from me. And I’m furious with Gran for pulling that stunt while I’m gone,” he said. “Rip up those papers and let her take it up with me on January third.”

  “Is she right, though?” I asked. “Nick, please be honest about that much. Don’t tell me it’s up to me and then have it turn out that it really wasn’t.”

  “There’s no moral superiority in citizenship. I didn’t care that you were an American when I fell in love with you, and the Commonwealth won’t care when it falls in love with you, either,” he said. “If that’s idealistic of me, then so be it.”

  “Wait. Did you say January third?” I asked. “That sounds almost soon.”

  “Twenty-one days,” he said, and I heard a huskiness in his voice. “Bex, please use this against me for the rest of our lives as an example of how I am about as clever as a shed. It was too long to be gone, and at the worst possible time.”

  I closed my eyes. “I love you,” I said. “I have never meant it more in my life.”

  “You know, nobody told me how long I could stay on this phone,” he said. “We can talk until it dies, and Miss Porter, it is fully charged.”

  “That might be the sexiest thing you have ever said to me.”

  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 be
en 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.”

  “And that actually bothered you?” I say before I can stop myself. Mom glares at me. “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “I know we’re in a fight, but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss you,” Lacey says, wounded. “Anyway, I went outside and called him back, and he told me you left the wedding a total wreck, and that you obviously needed me but were too proud to ask for my help. And…I don’t know, I felt something click, like I had a way to make this all magically okay after we’d been so pissed at each other. I just don’t know how Clive knew what I was going to see once I let myself in.”

  “There is no way he could have known,” I say. “Clive is a dick, apparently, but he’s not magic.”

  “I think he played a hunch, and got lucky,” she says. “He didn’t have anything to lose. If nothing was going on, sending me there would just make him look thoughtful. But if he was right…” Lacey takes a deep breath. “At first, I only listened, but then I looked. I left when Freddie really went for it with you.”

  “You should’ve come in,” I say lamely. “We could have explained.”

  “It seemed clear enough to me,” she says. “The way he touched your face, and kissed you, saying it wasn’t the first time…I was so angry. So jealous. I didn’t think. I just ran.”

  “Straight to Clive,” I guessed. “Who apparently hates me even more than you do.”

  “That’s not how it happened, and I told you, I don’t hate you,” she insists. “I can’t hate you, Bex. I wish I could. It would all hurt so much less.”

  “So instead of hating me, you hurt me back as hard as you could?” My resentment bubbles. “Newsflash, Lacey. These stories always have at least two sides. Not everything is only about you.”

  “No, it’s too busy only being about you,” she fires back, her tone escalating. “Do I need to remind you that you got mad at me for not toeing the line, when you’re the one making out with your fiancé’s brother? You already have Nick. Did you want to collect the complete set? Or just make sure you had it all so I had nothing?”

  Lacey’s vitriol catches me off guard, though I guess it shouldn’t. “Wow,” I say. “You may not hate me, but you do apparently think I’m a monster.”

  “I don’t! It’s just…You’re getting me all worked up again,” she flounders.

  “You’re worked up?” I say, hearing my voice turn shrill. “I have eight hundred guests picking up their dry cleaning today for a wedding that might not even happen if I don’t agree to be Clive’s mole.” My eyes fill with tears. “I either betray Nick, or…betray Nick.”

  “Don’t you think you already did that?” Lacey says harshly.

  The wind ekes out of me.

  “Lacey.” My mother shakes her head.

  “No. She’s right. I did.” I press the heels of my palms to my eyes. “And it wasn’t the first time. The night that, um…” I can’t say the words Dad died. “At that house party, Freddie and I kissed then, too.”

  Lacey closes her eyes. “I know,” she says, pained. “I mean, I didn’t, not for sure, but at one point Clive said he saw you both sneaking out of a closet that night, or something, and he always thought it was fishy.”

  “We’d been drinking,” I said. “We didn’t even know what we were doing. But, you know. Full disclosure.”

  Mom lets out a low whistle.

  “You channeled Dad right there,” I say, missing him fiercely.

  “Earl Porter had a way with sound effects,” Mom says with a sad expression. “Reminds me of you.” She shakes her head as if to knock out a cobweb. “Don’t get off-topic. When does Clive come back into this?”

  “Clive told me he was still at the wedding, but I guess he followed you guys back to London and, like, staked the place out,” Lacey says. “He saw me leave crying. But he didn’t come find me until later. I guess he thought it was smarter to hang around, see if Freddie left, maybe get a time-stamped picture. Which he got. After what, I don’t know.”

  “After nothing,” I insist. “Do you really think I’d sleep with Freddie?”

  “I didn’t even think you’d kiss
him, yet here we are,” Lacey says plainly. “The guy I was in love with, the guy you told me I couldn’t have because it would look bad. Do you know what it felt like, hearing him say things to you that I’d been dying for him to say to me? Honestly, my first instinct was to run in there and punch you both. Which is totally what you would’ve done before you were Princess Perfect, by the way.”

  “I know. And I swear, it caught me by surprise. Emotions were running high. I wish I had a better explanation than that,” I say. “There’s just a finite number of people who understand what it’s like inside that family, and it turns out Freddie has been unhappier than anyone noticed, and he got carried away…I guess we both did.”

  “But from where I was standing, it looked like you’d spent all that time warning me away from him so you could have both Prince Charmings to yourself,” Lacey says.

  It stings that she ever could have thought this. And if she did, other people probably will, too.

  “It was never like that,” I tell her. “You have to believe that.”

  “This was all an accident,” she counters. “You have to believe that.”

  We lock eyes. And then, just as it always does when my twin looks miserable, I feel my hardness start to smudge. What’s the point of making our bad deeds a comparative science? We both messed up. For the first time, I keenly see that we are both each other’s collateral damage.

  Mom clears her throat subtly. “You two made quite a bed for yourselves,” she says.

  “Clive really got to me,” Lacey admits. “He came over the next day, checking in, and found me all splotchy and puffy. Totally gross. I’d been crying for like twelve hours straight. He was so concerned, and so nice.” She looks crushed. “Stupid, pathetic me, that’s all it took. I played right into his hands. He must’ve been rejoicing inside when he realized what he had.”

  “You’re not pathetic, or stupid. He’s just good,” I said. “And he must really hate me.”

  Lacey looks over at me. “He does,” she says. “I went for drinks with him and Joss a lot over the last few months, and we’d always end up bitching about you and Nick like some bitter little support group. I’m not proud of it. But I thought I was safe with him. We were friends. He got every complicated feeling I had without ever judging any of them.”