“All right. We’re on the boat. I assume we are alone. Because it’s a boat. At sea. Suddenly, though, we hear the sound of a motor, and it’s growing louder. The playwright begins to panic. It’s her husband, she says, approaching on a speedboat. No sooner has she said this than we can hear him boarding. Unfortunately for me, we are poolside, we are naked, and our clothing is below deck. There is, however, a discarded article of clothing near the pool that I only later learned was called a ‘onesie.’ The playwright, it turns out, has a teenage son who is accomplished at video games and plays them on some kind of online gaming platform while people spectate. He does so wearing these ‘onesies.’ So what do I do?”

“You put on the onesie. Oh my god.”

“Indeed. And it gets worse. The playwright stops the frenzied panicking she’s been doing and starts chanting, ‘He’s going to kill me,’ over and over, such that I start to worry that perhaps she’s being literal. So I jump overboard.”

“No!”

“Yes! I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death.” He’d been trying to make his tale entertaining, but he sobered, remembering his panic when he started to fear that the husband was going to become violent. “We weren’t that far from the shore, so it wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds. So, to return to the narrative, over the edge I go. I swim to the shore, and I walk to my hotel.”

“In a onesie,” she said through laughter.

“Just so.”

“I wonder why there aren’t more pictures.”

“That is entirely thanks to Mr. Benz, the king’s equerry. Did you meet him last summer?”

“I did. He seems very . . . thorough.”

“Yes, he’s ex-military. I called Marie after I made it back to the hotel, and she put him on the case. He has mob boss–style abilities to make problems go away. There should have been more photos. There should have been close-ups showing that the onesie was, in fact, printed with tiny unicorns.”

She burst out laughing, and he was genuinely glad his pathetic story was making her laugh. It almost made it worth it.

“Why was there the one photo from the boat to begin with? Did the husband take it?”

“I have no idea. There was a staff member captaining the boat, but the playwright assured me he would be discreet.”

“Well, that was a mistake.”

“It certainly was.” Hence the development of his rules of engagement. “The larger point of my tale of woe is that the ‘Depraved Duke’ sobriquet is incorrect. The . . . proceedings themselves were rather mundane, all told. The more accurate phrase would be ‘Idiotic Duke.’ Or ‘Dumb Duke,’ if we want to preserve the alliterative qualities of the moniker.”

“But you’re not a duke.”

“Not yet, thank god.”

“What’s the last item on the list?”