My hair had been swept into a complicated chignon, with a small foam circle pinned to the back of my head to prevent the tiara from pressing into my skull and giving me a headache. Having thusly primed me, Kira placed the Lover’s Knot tiara on my head. It had sat there only once before, briefly, the day Eleanor let me choose my wedding headpiece, and I was reminded why Nick’s mother hadn’t liked it: The damn thing weighed a ton, and was almost too impressive for me to bear. For all Richard’s talk of symbolism, I knew he also was keenly aware that the Dutch possessed the best jewels of all the European royals, and—short of raiding the vault at the Tower—this was the fanciest in his coffers. He wanted to show off.

I shook my head back and forth gently. The pearls hanging from the twenty-five diamond arches clanked in their settings.

“Yikes,” I said. “I’m not going to be able to sneak up on anyone wearing this thing.”

Kira took a step back and appraised me. “Maybe not, but you look great. I am extremely good at my job.”

“You are,” I said, nodding.

“Try not to do that,” she said. “You’ll dislodge the doughnut.”

I winced. “And sprain my neck.”

As Kira fiddled with a few pins near my left ear, I stared at myself with an almost anthropological remove. For my new family, sticking on an iconic crown for a couple of hours was as usual as trying to wear in a new pair of shoes. But in that split second when the Lover’s Knot settled onto my head, for real this time and not simply as a wedding-day audition, I’d turned into someone foreign to myself. They were my eyes looking out from my own face, but what they saw was a person from a tabloid, too distant to touch. With a husband who’d been nearby the whole time but chose to stay across the hall, out of sight.

Kira’s hand hovered over my head. “Are we good here? The cops will not think it’s cute if I’m late bringing this back.”

“We’re good,” I said. “I just…don’t look like me, do I?”

Kira put her hands on my shoulders.

“I hate to break it to you,” she said. “But I think this is what you look like now.”

*  *  *