I heard a voice emanating from the foyer, and followed the sound in time to see the staff greeting another arrival for the day: Princess Daphne, shrugging off her plaid wool coat, with blond waves that looked recently brightened bouncing out of a matching hat.

“Bex!” she said. “You look wonderfully well.”

“Thank you,” I said, returning her smile. “And thank you so much for the flowers. They were the prettiest thing in the entire house.”

“I wanted you to have some good cheer,” she said. “I know how it feels when the walls start to close in but you’re not ready to leave them. I’m just sorry I couldn’t have visited myself. I had to dash back home for Christmas.”

“But you’re here now,” I said, masking my surprise. We walked into the main drawing room, where the camera crew was finishing its setup, and sat down on a sofa that had been pushed to the side of the room under a painting of the Duke of Wellington riding into battle at Waterloo.

“Freddie is uneasy about this,” Daphne said. “He needed moral support.”

“You two seem to have gotten really close,” I observed.

Daphne peered at me through long, darkened eyelashes. “Does that surprise you?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, and in the end, I said so.

“Perhaps I should rephrase,” she said. “Are you uncomfortable with that?”

“Of course not.”

But I was, a little. I couldn’t put my finger on why.

Freddie walked in at that moment, handsome in a gray suit. He looked tense.

“There’s a lot going on in that head,” she observed, nodding toward him. “Freddie was very worried for you that night, you know. Frightened.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” I said.

“Frightened in the way one is when they might lose someone important to them,” she pressed.

I shifted to face her. “Daphne, Freddie and I will always be important to each other.”

“I think you know that I don’t mean friendship,” Daphne said. “And the way you reached for him…”

“I was having a miscarriage,” I said, feeling defensiveness creep into my tone. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating, but—”

“I’m phrasing this badly,” Daphne amended, waving her hands in an apologetic gesture. “It’s simply that from where I stand, from where I was standing, I couldn’t help but wonder if there will ever be room there for anyone else.”

“Are you in love with him?” I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner.