Lacey and I had graduated from Cornell in upstate New York, so I’d done Manhattan more than a few times. We would take the long train ride into the city for a weekend spent whipsawing from the Guggenheim to Saks Fifth Avenue to nosebleed seats at Madison Square Garden, to a French bistro she knew Jennifer Aniston frequented, to a subterranean bar whose only sign was made of lightbulbs that spelled out BAR. I took us on the subway and wanted to walk for blocks; Lacey preferred cabs, especially at night, when people would turn their lights on and leave their windows open and we could peek into their apartments and their lives—their dinner parties, their built-in bookshelves, their dying balcony plants, packaged as thirty-second soap operas during the crawl up Tenth Avenue. As the skyline rose up now in front of me and Nick, I felt like I was reuniting with an old friend.

“It’s so lumpy,” was Nick’s poetic take.

“That is not a word I have ever heard used about New York,” I said.

“I just mean, everything along the way is pretty low and flat, and then, boom, all that height. It’s like when you shave your legs and miss an entire knee.”

He tickled mine and I swatted his hand away. I looked out at the city, all tall boxes and stone and steel, peppered with cranes and scaffolding, a city created so much by modernity as opposed to one carved by history that technology simply caught up to without asking permission. So much of our relationship had been Nick opening doors for me—sometimes of literal castles—but this was Bex Porter’s turf. I had a past here, and I was excited to introduce it to my present.

Nick had cast aside Bea’s seminal achievement in underestimating our intelligence—a binder called Washington, DC, Is Not a State—and was glued to the car window like a little kid. “A hot dog cart!” he narrated. “Oh, I think I read about that restaurant. Ooh, look, yellow taxis. Can we get bagels?”

“I am definitely not leaving without a bagel,” I assured him.

My phone buzzed. So did Nick’s. Simultaneously, we glanced down at them and made matching strangled sounds.

SHE’S A ROYAL BEXHIBITIONIST!

Bon appetit! The global media may be made to masticate its recent worshipful words about the Duke and Duchess of Clarence’s Canadian cavorting, because it appears our lady is a tramp. Photos exclusive to The Sun reveal a half-naked Reckless Rebecca flashing her goods in the Whistler gondola, risking the reputation of the entire monarchy for one tacky tryst. You can take it from me: This not-so-clandestine cock-up shames not only the country but the Commonwealth. The Queen and her regent Richard will be roiling with rage…