“Very funny,” I murmured. I greeted them both with a hug and kiss on the cheek and took one of the empty seats. We always had the table by the bay window, and as the restaurant overlooked the local park, it had the best view. “How are you both?” I asked after a moment. “We haven’t done this in a while.”

Eva tucked her hair behind her ear and sighed. “Work has been so busy I’ve barely had a moment to breathe. I think this is my first day off in ten days. We’re preparing for a big exhibition for a local artist and it’s taking forever to set up because Jay keeps changing his mind about how to set everything out.”

Eva worked as the assistant manager in the art gallery in the village, and we’d heard so many times how fussy her boss was, so this wasn’t surprising.

“Ugh, I’m sorry,” I said, removing my sunglasses from my head and folding them on the table next to my water. “What about you, Addy?”

“Same old,” she replied. “Still trying to make it as a writer, still getting manuscripts kicked back for reasons not even cows would crap out.” She opened the menu and scanned it. “You?”

I sighed. Where did I begin? “The goats keep escaping, Alexander stayed over last night, I can’t work on this assignment for love nor money, and if anyone murders the gardener, it wasn’t me.”

She snapped the menu closed. “That sounds far more interesting than me perusing this menu when I already know I’m getting the chicken alfredo.”

“Amen to that.” Eva followed suit. “Spill.”

So I did.

I told them about the goats and how they must have watched The Great Escape because that’s what they kept doing. I followed it up with the discussion about Alexander and how he thought I should tell my father about the course I was doing that I was almost certainly going to fail if I couldn’t figure out this garden layout, and how utterly frustrating Miles Kingsley was.

The worst.

They both nodded along and made sympathetic noises, exactly as I’d expected them to do. They were my best friends, after all, and that was exactly what I wanted from them. No judgement, no snarky comments, no eye rolling. Just good old-fashioned co-operative sympathy.

The waitress came to take our order, and we all ordered the same thing as usual—Adelaide with the chicken alfredo, Evangeline with the soup of the day, and me with the salmon and hollandaise sauce.

“Wow. Does your dad still not know about the course?” Eva asked, reaching for her water.

I shook my head. “I know I need to tell him, but I’m not sure how to. Alex said last night that I’ve built it up more in my head than I needed to, but given that Dad’s been in Windsor the past two days and made it clear he was setting me up with Steven…”

Addy shuddered. “No. I don’t care if he’s going to be one of the most prestigious dukes in the country, nothing is worth being his wife and duchess.”