I hoped they would loosen up once we got into it with the kids. We all sat on the floor of their lounge, a cozy, carpeted space done up in warm tones, which the residents had been encouraged to wallpaper with handwritten inspirational quotes, photos, and even in-jokes. Nick surprised me by breaking the ice with a short recollection of his mother, and one by one, the kids took turns discussing their unique struggles. One girl described her depression as bleaching the color out of the world; another kid said he felt like he was living inside a permanent, chilly fog. Others talked plainly about feeling anxious from the moment their eyes opened in the morning to the second they closed at night. An older teenage boy recounted lying awake obsessing about his fears, which grew and multiplied and took on lives of their own, until he felt like his brain was running on a treadmill where an unseen force kept relentlessly upping the pace.

And Nick cried.

Actual dripping tears.

Freddie shot me an alarmed glance over the top of Nick’s head. Nick’s public face rarely slipped, but this time it fell all the way off into his lap.

“My goodness,” he managed.

The kids seemed unfazed. “People cry in here all the time,” one of them said, and passed him a box of Kleenex. “You should’ve seen Martina the other day.”

“I’m allowed to be upset,” snapped a girl whose nametag ID’d her as the Martina in question. “My sister has never tried to understand me and she has some bloody nerve coming to visit and hitting on Jamison.”

A good-looking kid I took to be Jamison winked at me. Nick simply dabbed at his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish my mum could meet you all. She would be very proud of you, and as inspired as I am by your strength.”

It was an effective—and honest—save, but it inevitably leaked to the media that the future king had lost his composure. Much of the media and most royal watchers were sympathetic, but the Mirror theorized that Freddie and I had broken him, and Xandra Deane sounded the alarm that this was a breach of British tradition: A stiff upper lip does you no good if your lower one trembles, she wrote. Clive offered, You can take it from me: The Prince Regent will be furious at Namby-Pamby Nicholas, the Duke of Drip, which was incredibly hacky (as usual), but got great play on Twitter.