Page 6

“Are you coming to Sandringham for Christmas?” I say, hiking up the hem of my gown so it doesn’t drag on the floor. My bare feet are freezing, but I’m too worn-out to care.

“Sandringham?” says Tibby. “Why on earth would I spend Christmas there?”

“Queen Victoria’s your ancestor, isn’t she? Doesn’t that make you family?”

“If anything more distant than first cousins was still considered family, half of England’s aristocratic marriages wouldn’t exist,” she says. “I’m spending Christmas at our country home in Kent, and for the New Year, I’ll be in the Seychelles.”

“Oh.” I don’t expect her to work during the holidays, of course, but the thought of Tibby not being there to cram my schedule full of lessons and fittings and appearances for three whole weeks is both daunting and exhilarating. “I’ll miss you.”

She gives me a strange look, though there’s a softness to it that’s almost foreign on her sharp features. “I’ll be back before you know it. And in the meantime, you’ll get to learn how to hunt and ski, and you’ll have plenty of empty hours to spend with Maisie.”

“Absolutely none of those things sounds appealing,” I say as we approach my apartment. “Kit’s coming, though.”

“Is he? Should I make sure certain necessities are added to your luggage?”

It takes me a beat to realize what she means, and my cheeks instantly grow hot. “No,” I say firmly. “We’re not—no.”

“Better safe than sorry,” she hums, pushing open the door. And while my face still burns, the fact that Tibby isn’t treating me like I’m about to break—especially when everyone else in my life, Kit included, avoids the topic completely—almost makes up for the humiliating breach of privacy. Almost.

The royal jeweler appears in record time to take possession of the Queen Florence tiara, but Tibby makes him wait a solid ten minutes while she figures out the perfect angle for Instagram. Even though the tiara is technically mine—Queen Florence, my great-grandmother, willed it to me when I was a baby—it’s kept in a vault somewhere, or maybe the Tower of London, where the Crown Jewels are guarded. Either way, I won’t see it again until the next state banquet, or whatever future event requires me to wear a tiara, and despite my tender scalp, I’m sorry to see it go.

Tibby sticks around only long enough to make sure my dress is hung up properly, and as soon as she leaves, I wrap myself in a fuzzy blanket, flop onto the antique sofa, and open my laptop. Rather than scour British news sites—and possibly, by now, CNN and various popular celebrity blogs—for commentary about my supposed flirtation with Thaddeus, I open VidChat and click my mother’s icon.

Two rings echo throughout my sitting room, which is surprisingly cozy tonight as a fire crackles beneath the elaborate mantelpiece, and suddenly my mother’s smiling face appears on-screen. Her auburn curls are loose, a sure sign she’s not in her studio for once, and I notice a large abstract landscape behind her—the one that hangs in her dining room.

“Evie! How did it go?” she says, and while sometimes she’s distracted and agitated, especially when her doctors are adjusting her medication, tonight she’s clear-eyed and fully focused on me. “I saw the photos online—you looked stunning.”

I grimace. “It was fine, I guess. If you’ve seen the pictures, then you already know what happened.”

“You mean when the president’s son grabbed you?” she says. “What happened there?”

I explain everything, from my broken shoe to how late Tibby and I were, to my encounter with Thaddeus in the library, and by the time I’m through, my mother sighs.

“Missteps happen, Evie,” she says. “Especially when you’re in the public eye so often. You’re all right, though? Your ankle is okay, and he didn’t…?”

I shake my head. “He didn’t touch me, except to stop me from falling on my face. My ankle’s a little sore, but it’ll be fine. I just…” It’s not easy, is it? Having to be two people at once. “I’m not good at being perfect all the time.”

“No one is, sweetheart,” she says. “And you haven’t had much of a chance to practice, either. You’ll get better at the details as you go.”

I’m not sure I want to, though. But while my mother broke up with Alexander, the love of her life, to avoid becoming queen, she seems to derive no end of pride and pleasure from watching me take my place as his daughter, no matter how bad I am at it.

“You haven’t seen anyone lurking near the house, have you?” I say after a beat, eager to change the subject. “Alexander said the palace is still getting daily questions about you from that reporter.”

“The one who’s writing a biography of me?” she says. “No, security hasn’t seen anything suspicious, and neither have I. But a friend said she received a strange phone call asking about the family, so it’s likely only a matter of time before he figures out where I am.”

I scowl. “If anything happens—”

“I’ll be sure to let your father know immediately,” she says. “Though honestly, Evie, sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be in my best interest to work with…what’s his name?”

“Ryan,” I say bitterly. “Ryan Crewes.”

“Ryan Crewes,” she echoes. “If he’s going to write my story, I might as well have some say in it.”

While she has a point, the events of my childhood don’t exactly paint her in a positive light. I have no memory of it, but my mother was arrested for trying to drown me in a bathtub when I was four, in the midst of a psychotic break due to undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. In her own unwell mind, she was trying to protect me from my stepmother, Helene—who, as far as I know, hadn’t actually threatened me. But my mother’s mental illness lied to her constantly. It still does, on her bad days, even with medication and treatment. While I know the public will draw their own conclusions with or without the real story, I don’t want to see her words twisted into something monstrous in order to sell more books. And I wouldn’t put anything past Ryan Crewes or the other so-called royal biographers who’ve been circling us for months.

“Maybe you can work with someone you’ve handpicked,” I suggest. In a few years, once the sensational headlines that ran for weeks over the summer have faded in public memory. “But for now—”

The sharp rap of knuckles on wood ricochets through my sitting room, and I jump, twisting around to glare at the offending door. My mother leans toward the camera, her frown deepening.