“I mean, it’s…directional?” I offered. “Isn’t that the word Vogue is always using?”

Donna pulled the same face she’d made the time we tried to see if I could carry off culottes.

“The American’t is always squawking that I’m too boring. Besides, the press pool won’t be there,” I reminded her. “There’s only a live feed of the procession into dinner. The internet might not even get a screen grab of the whole gown.”

I now regretted my can-do attitude. The skintight middle section exploded in a cumbersome poufball that began at my knee and smothered the only thing I actually liked—my gold sparkly shoes. I could barely walk.

“That’s…wow,” Nick managed, when I came downstairs.

“Don’t ask,” I said, sidestepping down until I landed in the foyer. “Mostly because I don’t have any answers. I am going to need anti-chafing salve for my thighs.”

“Ooh, la la,” he said. “Are you ready for this?”

“As much as I’ll ever be,” I said. “Circumstances are not ideal.”

I imbued that with as much double meaning as I could. Nick simply futzed with his cuffs and stared straight ahead.

“If I’ve learnt anything this year, it’s that they rarely are,” he said.

Our car pulled up outside, and PPO Popeye tapped on the horn. Stand tall, I told myself.

That was challenging with the Lover’s Knot on my head. But my headache was nothing compared to what Queen Lucretia had to be feeling in her skyscraper of a piece. Composed of what looked like a thousand diamonds and nearly that many sapphires, her tiara was so shiny that I could barely look directly at it—and she confided in me during the cocktail hour in Buckingham Palace’s rectangular pink-walled picture gallery that she had another one that she felt was too flamboyant to be worn while Eleanor was not well. That someone could consider the tiara on her head a restrained option would have been a hilarious fiction from anyone but Lax, who clearly had spent hours debating how to show her esteem to Richard while also paying her respects to Eleanor.

“My heart is breaking,” she had said, dabbing at her eyes with the black tulle cape she’d worn over her evening gown. “I would trade all my jewels for her health.”

Hax rubbed her back and cooed something in Dutch, and Lax blushed and planted such a kiss on his cheek that you could almost see the mark from her lipstick in the official photos.

“What did he say?” I asked Daphne.

“You probably can imagine.” She sighed. “They’re very devoted. Another way they’re hard to live up to.”