We grinned at each other and clinked Hula Hoops before each biting them off our middle fingers. I was still barely pregnant; when we’d gone to the doctor, he told us I was probably six weeks along, handed me some prenatal vitamins, and ordered me to check back in a month or so. With each day that passed, every time I bumped my boobs and they hurt, every time I scrambled to the bathroom to barf in the middle of the night, this pregnancy had started to feel more real, and I was relaxing into the idea that this was the universe hard at work. And it was delicious for me and Nick to have a secret, one private thing that belonged only to us, as we went about our otherwise very public business.

Keldah Ansari came back on the news over a shot of Buckingham Palace, where a crowd of mourners was sobbing and placing wreaths next to framed photos, or lighting tiny glass-potted candles.

“She would have hated this,” Nick said.

“Unreservedly,” I said. “That almost makes it better.”

“She was the crabbiest person I’ve ever known,” Nick said, and his voice was thick. “She once gave me a welt the size of a plum from whacking my shin with that cane.”

If death could not take Eleanor, then apparently it settled for the next queen over. Marta died as she had lived: in the middle of a late-night Twitter fight. Her last communication to the world had been a GIF of Jennifer Lawrence sarcastically giving a thumbs-up, sent to @DuchClarH8r, who had been complaining I didn’t deserve to wear Emma’s ring because I was a crusty social-climbing hag.

I was touched. Royal historians had no idea what texture they were missing.