Chapters (49)

I thought back to the last few months. I guess I had been less aggro about taking my Pill at exactly the same hour every morning. I’d gotten confused when we were on tour about adapting it to the time zones, and never got back on track. But they weren’t that sensitive, were they? Besides, I’d had my…

Wait. I counted, and then I looked at my twin sister, whose smug smile met my frozen wide eyes.

Then I grabbed the bowl one more time.

ACT THREE

Men and kings must be judged in the testing moments of their lives.

—Winston Churchill

CHAPTER ONE

Niles Kensington might have missed the wedding, but he made it back for the funeral.

Three weeks after Lacey got married, I woke up in the middle of the night, and Nick wasn’t in bed. This wasn’t, on its own, surprising; he’d always been a bad sleeper. But even through a bleary half-open eye I could tell he wasn’t in the corner reading or up in Sex Den with a crossword, and I didn’t hear a telltale clanking from the kitchenette down the hall. The alarm clock next to the bed cheerfully hit 2:48 a.m. My standard instinct was to leave Nick to his insomnia, but under the circumstances, it seemed prudent to check.

I tiptoed downstairs. I could hear the low sound of the TV emanating from Nick’s study.

“For those of you up late with us tonight, we’ll be back after the break with live updates from outside Buckingham Palace,” a woman was saying as I poked my head inside the room. “I’m Keldah Ansari and you’re watching BBC News.”

A somber version of the usual theme song started clonking as a graphic flashed onscreen: GREAT BRITAIN IN MOURNING.

“What updates could they possibly have?” I wondered, leaning against the doorjamb. “It’s the middle of the night.”

Nick, sprawled on the brown leather sofa in his sweatpants with a bowl of Hula Hoops resting on his chest, twitched at the sound of my voice.

“Sorry,” I said, flopping down next to him. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I thought you were asleep,” Nick said. He moved his knitting to make more space for me. “Everything okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Mom keeps telling me that I won’t sleep through the night for the next eighteen years, anyway.”

As soon as Nick and I had gotten home from Cambridge, I made a beeline for our upstairs linen closet. It contained a trove of items Bea didn’t want us to be seen purchasing: pregnancy tests, condoms, lube, anti-diarrheal meds, super-plus tampons (“Anything above regular is gossip fodder,” she’d said very seriously), and, for some reason, dental floss, as if the nation would be scandalized to learn that royals have to fend off gingivitis.