But no, there it was, right in the middle of the guest list: Mr. Connor Dean Markham, with an address in Houston.
So he’d left town, Beatrice thought dazedly. She tried not to think beyond that, but some part of her couldn’t help wondering what his life was like, whether he was happy. Whether he’d met someone new.
What was he doing on the invite list?
She leaned forward to press her intercom. “Robert? I need to talk to you about the wedding invitations.”
A few moments later, Robert’s new assistant, Jane, opened the door. She was pulling a wheeled cart behind her—which was laden with four enormous boxes.
“Jane,” Beatrice asked slowly, “is that all the wedding invitations?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Jane knelt down to pull a box from the lower shelf of the cart. “I wasn’t sure what your concern was, so I brought them all. There are forty blank invitations here; if you’d like to add someone, give me their name and I’ll have the calligrapher complete it.”
“It’s fine,” Beatrice cut in. “I just had a question regarding one invitation in particular.”
Robert peered around the open door. “Can I be of service?”
Beatrice nodded. “There’s a name on the guest list that surprised me. My former Guard, Connor Markham.”
“It’s tradition that we invite former Revere Guards to a royal wedding,” Robert said slowly. “You’ll see that some of your other previous Guards were also included.”
Beatrice blinked down at the list. Sure enough, a few of her other guards—Ari and Ryan—were listed below Connor.
“I see,” she said carefully. “However, I’d like to remove Connor from the list.”
“Is there a problem that I need to be aware of?”
Robert held her gaze for a long, slow moment. Beatrice wondered, suddenly, if he knew. She had no idea how he might have found out—but if anyone could dig up other people’s secrets, it was Robert.
“Not at all.” She marveled at how casual her voice came out, despite the hammering of her heart.
Jane looked up from one of the boxes, which read J–N on the side in thick black marker. She’d been fanning through the invitations filed inside, and was now holding one of them.
Beatrice’s hand darted out to snatch the envelope from Jane’s grip.
“Thank you. I’ll need to think about this,” she declared, with forced calm.
“Of course.” Jane bobbed a curtsy and headed out into the hall, pulling the cart behind her. Robert hesitated, his eyes still fixed curiously on the queen, then followed.
Beatrice sank into her chair. Franklin had woken up at all the noise; he ran over to nudge playfully at her legs. She let him climb up into her lap, not caring that he was getting hair all over her oyster-colored pants, and unfolded the envelope.
The invitation was heavy, her royal monogram stamped at the top in bright gold foil. Beatrice had never asked how long it took for the palace calligrapher to painstakingly write out each invitation by hand.
An invitation for Connor, to her wedding with Teddy.
They were two names that didn’t belong in the same sentence. Two very distinct parts of her life, about to collide in a spectacular and fiery crash.
Beatrice’s breath came in short gasps. She didn’t want to think of Connor. She had tried to banish him from her mind ever since that night at Walthorpe, when everything with Teddy had become acutely real. But he was still there, a shadowy figure in the corners of her heart.
She couldn’t help imagining what would happen if she actually sent the invitation. She could almost see the emotions flickering over Connor’s face when he opened it: shock, anger, confusion, and finally a wary uncertainty. He would spend weeks debating whether or not to come, would change his mind a thousand times, and then at the very last minute—right when he’d decided against it—he would race to the airport and make it just in time, wearing his old Guard’s uniform—
And then what? Did she expect him to stand there and watch as she married someone else?
Beatrice stared at her family coat of arms, carved in the heavy stone of the mantelpiece: a pair of horizontal lines surmounted by three stars and a roaring griffin. As everyone knew, the stars and stripes of the Washingtons’ coat of arms had been the original inspiration behind the American flag.
Stamped below the crest were the words of her family motto: FACIMUS QUOD FACIENDUM EST. We do what we must.
Beatrice had always assumed that motto was about the Revolution: that King George I—General George Washington, he’d been then—hadn’t wanted to go to war with Great Britain and lead thousands of men to their deaths, but that independence was worth it. Now, however, the motto seemed to take on a new meaning.
We do what we must, no matter if it means letting go of people we care about. No matter what our choices end up costing.
Beatrice nudged Franklin so that he jumped out of her lap, then leaned down and ran her hand along the bottom of the desk. When she felt a latch, she pulled, and the concealed drawer popped open.
There—in a drawer designed two centuries ago, to hide state secrets—Beatrice now kept a single wedding present, tied with a satin ribbon.
It was from Connor. He’d given it to her the night of her engagement party to Teddy. Beatrice still couldn’t bring herself to open it, yet she couldn’t bear to throw it away, either.
She set the invitation carefully on top of the gift, then shut the drawer with a gentle click.
The student center was always crowded in the afternoons, full of people who stopped by to watch the massive communal TVs, or make a halfhearted attempt at studying. Nina was currently sitting at a two-person table with Ethan, tuning out the noise as she planned her upcoming essay on Middlemarch. When he let out a yelp of excitement, she glanced up at the baseball game. “Who’s winning?”
“The Yeti just got a home run,” Ethan explained.
She frowned up at the screen. “Is that the team in red?”
He burst out laughing. “Nina, the Yeti isn’t a team. Yeti is a player—Leo Yetisha, everyone calls him the Yeti? Didn’t you pay any attention all those times we watched games from the royal box?”
“Honestly, no.” She’d either been talking to Sam or stealing glances at Jeff. It felt strange to think about that now. “In my defense, a yeti would be a fantastic mascot. It’s way scarier than the Cardinals or Red Sox.”
“Of course,” Ethan said drily, “the Yeti, famously the most terrifying of all fantastic beasts.”
Nina smiled and stood up, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “I’m heading over to see Sam.” She hadn’t actually warned Sam she was coming, but Nina thought her friend could use a surprise right now.
In the weeks since the party, Sam and Marshall had gone on a couple of public dates, though it hadn’t distracted people from buzzing about their pool photos. Nina wasn’t a media expert, but even she knew that a raunchy make-out wasn’t the best way to introduce a royal relationship, real or fake.
This was precisely why Nina had warned Sam in the first place. Couldn’t she have found some easier way of making Teddy jealous, instead of involving the media—and hurting Marshall and his family in the process?
Nina wondered if she should reach out to Marshall, ask how he was handling things. She knew firsthand how it felt to be the focus of that kind of tabloid attention, and discrimination. The headlines might not be overtly racist, but the comments undoubtedly were.
“Have fun with Sam,” Ethan said, standing up to give Nina a quick goodbye kiss.
She thought again how nice it was, getting to be with someone without any secrets or subterfuge. No more NDAs, no more hiding in the back of a town car, no more seeing her boyfriend in public and pretending that he meant nothing to her.
When she and Ethan walked across campus, Nina would reach out to
catch his hand; when they studied together in the library, Ethan would toss her crumpled-up notes that said things like You’re cute when you’re focused. A few nights ago they’d gone out to dinner, to the tiny sushi place a block from campus, and ended up lingering for hours over a bottomless bowl of edamame. Their conversation had veered wildly from music—Ethan was appalled that Nina could quote entire musicals but not a single Bruce Springsteen song: “We are fixing this now,” he’d moaned, and handed her an earbud—to speculation about their World History professor, and whether he might be secretly writing fan fiction about members of a British boy band.
She’d learned that Ethan and his mom used to go on a spontaneous road trip every summer. That he could trace all the constellations but didn’t know the stories behind them, which was where Nina and her love of mythology came in.
She’d learned that when he slept, he curled on his side, his arms tucked beneath his head as if he were trying to take up as little space as possible, his eyelashes twitching with the movement of his dreams.
The only thing they hadn’t discussed was how they planned on telling Jeff.
At first Nina had been confident that they were doing the right thing, keeping it from him. There was no reason to upset him if she and Ethan weren’t even going to last. Now, though…they needed to tell him. Nina was uncomfortably reminded of how it had felt when she was secretly dating Jeff, and hiding their relationship from Sam.
She headed through the front door of the palace—and there he was, Prince Jefferson himself, clattering down the staircase.
Somehow Nina was unsurprised. In her experience the palace had always worked that way, as if the building were under some perverse enchantment, flinging you directly into the path of the one person you’d hoped to avoid.
“Hey, Jeff.” She strove for a casual, friendly tone, more good to see you again than I’m secretly dating your best friend. “I was just heading up to see Sam.”
She started to edge past him, but Jeff’s next words made her fall still.
“Is it true? Are you really sleeping with Ethan?”
Nina felt his words like a punch to the gut. She glanced back and forth, then swallowed. This wasn’t at all how she’d hoped to have this conversation.
“We’re not—I mean—” she stammered. Ethan had been sleeping in her dorm room, yes, but they hadn’t actually…
“So it’s true.” Jeff took a step back, a hand braced on the stair railing. “When the reporter told me, I didn’t believe it. But now I do.”
“You talked to a reporter?”
Jeff’s jaw tensed. “Just this morning, I got a call from some editor at the Daily News—I have no clue how she found my number—asking if I’d like to comment on the fact that my ex-girlfriend and my best friend are the new ‘it couple’ of King’s College.”
“We’re not an ‘it couple,’ ” Nina protested, and immediately winced.
“I told the reporter she was wrong. ‘I’ve known them both since kindergarten,’ I said; ‘if they were together, they would have told me.’ But she’d done her homework—she had a whole story ready to go, complete with quotes from classmates who said they always saw you together, holding hands.”
Nina’s stomach lurched. She and Ethan should have been more careful. Now that story would go to print, and it would be like last time all over again: her name the punch line of a trashy joke, her parents’ house swarmed with reporters—
Jeff sighed, clearly following her train of thought. “I got my lawyer involved, and he convinced the reporter not to run the story.”
“Thank you,” Nina said softly.
A trio of footmen walked past, carrying an enormous vase between them. They cast the prince and his ex-girlfriend a few looks, then quickly averted their eyes.
“Of course. I wasn’t about to let them drag you through the mud like they did last time.” There was a pained softness to Jeff’s eyes, a pinch at the corner of his mouth. “I just…I never thought it would be like this. I knew that you and I would date other people, but I assumed we were on good enough terms that we would give each other fair warning. At least, I was planning on giving you that courtesy.”
Nina blinked. “Are you and Daphne getting back together?”
“Maybe,” Jeff said bluntly. “If we did, I wasn’t going to let you find out from the tabloids. I thought we owed each other that much, at least.”
Nina squirmed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so small. “I’m sorry. You’re right; we should have told you.”
“How long has it been going on?” Jeff asked. “Since before the party?”
“Um. Not technically.”
He closed his eyes, and Nina knew he was thinking of all the times he’d seen Ethan since then, when Ethan could have brought this up and instead kept his mouth shut.
“I want you to be happy, I really do,” Jeff said hoarsely. “But does it have to be with my very best friend?”
In that moment, Nina realized the full extent of the hurt she’d caused.
She had always known that dating Ethan would make things awkward. But she hadn’t fully grasped that in dating Ethan, she was fracturing Jeff’s relationship with his best friend—one of the few people he really trusted, in a world where it was hard to trust anyone.
How would Jeff and Ethan move forward from this? What were they supposed to do, hang out and play video games as if Nina didn’t exist? As if she and Ethan hadn’t gotten together, knowing full well it would hurt Jeff, then purposefully hid it from him?
Jeff ran a hand wearily through his hair. “Nina,” he said, in a deflated voice that cut her to the quick. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“When you broke up with me, you said it was because you wanted out of this world. You told me that you couldn’t handle the royal life, with all its scrutiny and publicity. And now you’re dating my best friend.” He laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “I just had to kill a tabloid story about your relationship. From where I’m sitting, you haven’t really gone that far from the spotlight.”
Nina’s head was spinning. She wanted to call a quick time-out so that she could catalog everything she’d felt in the last few minutes: her anger at being attacked by a reporter yet again; her hurt at learning that Jeff and Daphne might get back together. And her guilt at the realization of how epically she’d hurt Jeff and Ethan.
Was Jeff right? She had worked so hard to distance herself from the royal world, to make people forget that she was someone they’d seen in the newsstand tabloids. By dating Ethan, was she letting herself fall into the same mess all over again?
She looked up at him with sudden uncertainty. “Jeff—”
“Whatever. Forget it,” he said, and his steps receded down the hallway.
Nina stood there for a moment in cold, shaky silence. Then she squared her shoulders and headed upstairs.
She found Samantha on the couch in her sitting room, her hair twisted back with a clip as she tapped viciously at her phone. There was a blurred shadow in her eyes that set Nina’s best-friend radar on high alert.
“What are we looking at?” she asked, sitting down next to Sam.
The princess gave an aggrieved sigh and handed over her phone. She’d been scrolling through Kelsey Brooke’s profile page.
“Can you believe this girl?” Sam snapped. “I mean, she’s nauseatingly fake. I don’t know what Marshall sees in her.”
Nina flicked through a few photos: Kelsey wearing a denim jacket and short-shorts, rollerblading on a boardwalk; Kelsey’s glittery dark nails curled around a green juice, with the caption Rise and shine, my witches!
Well, at least it was better than what Nina had assumed Sam was doing—flipping through the comments section of one of the articles about her and Marshall.
> “Did I miss something? Why are we hate-stalking Kelsey?” she asked.
“No reason,” Sam said swiftly. “Just that I’ll see her when Marshall and I go to LA next month. And he’ll want to talk to her, since, you know, he’s trying to get her back.” Sam rolled her eyes. “God knows why.”
Nina pulled one of Sam’s pillows onto her lap and began playing with the fringe. “So…I ran into your brother on the way up here. He knows about me and Ethan.” At Sam’s concerned look, she let the whole story pour out, about how Jeff had learned the truth from a reporter.
“It’s not entirely your fault,” Sam hurried to assure her. “Ethan deserves at least half the blame. Maybe more, since he’s Jeff’s best friend.”
Nina flinched. “Exactly. I took Jeff’s best friend from him! I can’t imagine how I would feel, if you secretly dated my ex—”
“That would be slightly problematic, given that your ex is my brother.”
Nina choked out a laugh. “You know what I mean. I just…I would be devastated, if something like that ever came between us.”
“Nothing could ever come between us. I swear it,” Sam said fervently.
Sam’s phone buzzed with an incoming message. Nina didn’t mean to pry, but she instinctively glanced down at the screen—and bristled when she saw who it was.
“Why is Daphne texting you?”
Sam typed out a quick reply. “She’s actually on her way over.”
“Why?”
Nina had never told Sam the full story of her breakup with Jeff: how Daphne had confronted her in the ladies’ room at the palace, and threatened to ruin Nina’s life unless she broke up with the prince.
“I know I always complained about her,” Sam was saying, oblivious to Nina’s inner turmoil, “but—I don’t know, maybe she’s not as bad as I thought. She’s going to help train me for all the stuff I need to do as heir to the throne.”
“I thought Robert was training you?” Nina asked hoarsely.
“Robert is insufferable and irritating, and Daphne…” Sam shrugged. “Just give her a try, for my sake?”
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