“And you are an even worse cook than I am,” he said, “but are getting very adept at watercolors, and I can’t wait to hang some of your pieces from Wigtown in our house.”

“But that house is in London,” I said. “Whether we want it to be or not. And unless we show up soon, what’s in the papers is only going to get worse. We can’t pretend that whole other part of our lives doesn’t exist.”

“Why not?” he asked. “It’s worked so far.”

“Has it? Because I’m starting to think we’ve been fooling ourselves.”

The silence between us stretched and expanded, and I let it, having learned not to rush Nick into his feelings. He walked away from me and fussed with some of the other vegetables in the garden, then kicked the grass and looked at the cottage.

“They say nothing good can last,” he said.

“We can last,” I said, coming up next to him and sliding an arm around his waist. “I think we’re pretty good.”

“I feel like I’m about to say goodbye to a friend I’ll never see again,” he said. “And I don’t only mean Steve and Margot, although she was a proper vixen.”

I let my head fall against him. “Margot will never really leave. She’ll just start plucking her eyebrows again.”

He took my hand and rubbed at the spot where my ring should be. We’d left the famed Lyons Emerald back at Kensington Palace for safekeeping.

“I don’t want this,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying, but I still don’t want to do it.”

“Neither do I, but I don’t think it matters,” I replied. “I think we have to deal with a lot of stuff we don’t want to, including—”

A bracing knock came at the door, followed a second later by Nick’s cell phone blaring Taylor Swift on the nearby patio table.

“I’ll get the door, you get Taylor,” I said.

I marched back inside as I heard Nick answer the phone. With one glance through the peephole, I gasped audibly, and pulled open the door.

“Greetings, Your Royal Highness,” said PPO Stout, an apologetic look on his face. “You really shouldn’t open the door without your wig on.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked, waving him inside and closing the door. “I mean, I knew you were here, probably, but not here here…”

“I believe the duke may have some intel on that,” Stout said.

Nick appeared and shook Stout’s hand, but his face was white as a sheet.

“Gran’s had a heart attack,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.”

* * *

Eleanor tended to dash off to her home in the northeastern Scottish countryside more than was reasonable, given its distance from the monarchy’s official seat in London. Balmoral had been a royal refuge dating all the way back to the reign of Victoria I, whose husband Albert purchased it in the 1800s and built it up into a sprawling granite fairy-tale castle. Eleanor claimed to find it a welcome hideout from the honking, touristy bustle of London, but Nick suspected part of the appeal was that Balmoral was entirely hers: It was not owned by the Crown, and nothing but the majestic old ballroom was open to the public. That she’d fallen ill there meant we only had to drive four hours to her bedside, but it’s still agony to spend four hours driving toward a family you stormed away from, after learning its most important member is dying.