“That’s just it. I have no idea where we stand.” He flexed his fingers and fidgeted. “I feel like I can’t breathe in here.”

I closed my eyes to gather my thoughts, and when I opened them, he was already at the double doors.

“Nick, wait,” I called after him. He stopped in the foyer. My stomach felt like it was trying to climb out of my mouth as I caught up to him.

“You said you forgave Freddie the night of our St. James’s wedding because you felt like you had to,” I said, taking his hand and holding it to my pounding heart. “Did you…is that also why you married me? Because it was easier than the alternative?”

He was quivering. I rubbed his hand as if trying to hold him together myself.

“I love you,” he said. “That was the one truth I knew for certain. So I thought, Just get married, make it real, and then we’ll deal with what comes.” He stepped away from me and my hand fell. “But what if that’s why you chose me?”

“It’s not,” I said, a tear slipping down my cheek. “I chose you for you. I chose you when Freddie asked me to run away with him, and I chose you every day after that. I choose you now.”

“I tried to push past this, I did, but as soon as we came back here the doubt crept in.” I could barely hear him. “Even looking at you right now makes it hurt all over again. I just…I can’t. I need time. I need…”

Whatever it was, I never heard it, because his words were lost in the slamming of the front door. For what felt like an eternity, I watched, waited, willed it to open again. But it didn’t. And standing there, surrounded by the byzantine rooms of Apartment 1A, I stared down at the gold G on the floor of my foyer and felt nothing so much as alone in another person’s life—not only Georgina’s, but also my own.

ACT TWO

ACT TWO

I beseech you now with all my heart definitely to let me know your whole mind as to the love between us.

—King Henry VIII

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Come on, Duchess, hold still, or else I’ll stab you in the ear, and it might not be an accident.”

“I’m trying!” I said to Kira, my hair and makeup person and the only American in my orbit who wasn’t related to me. “I wish you would go back to calling me Bex. Or Rebecca. Or even Hey You.”

Kira cocked a brow at me, and reached for a bobby pin.