I dropped his hand like a hot potato.

Freddie turned and grabbed his jacket, swinging it over his shoulder. He paused as he walked past me, and then, as if for the last time, bent down and kissed me on the top of my head.

“Good luck, Bex,” he said. “I hope we all get what we need.”

He left, and I sat there, staring out the paned doors onto the garden and beyond. Worrying about Nick. Worrying about Freddie. Wondering if Daphne, Freddie’s insistence aside, knew that she’d said yes to being someone’s safety pick. Wondering if, in the end, it even mattered. When the phone buzzed on the arm of my chair, I didn’t even look, just lifted it to my ear in a trance. I don’t remember saying hello. I don’t remember what, exactly, Dr. Akhtar said. But when we hung up, my arm fell to my lap, my phone tumbling to the floor.

“I’m pregnant,” I said, to the empty room.

CHAPTER THREE

And then the makeup artist got powder all over my beard,” Freddie said. “I looked like a very sad Santa impersonator.”

“Poor thing was mortified,” Daphne said, sticking her head into the FaceTime frame and giving me a little wave. “Her hands were shaking so hard.”

“I have that effect,” Freddie said. “I can’t help it. I’m magnetic.”

“Obviously,” I snorted.

“We took one like that for posterity,” he said. “If we draw a little hat on it, it could be our Christmas card.”

“Always thinking ahead,” Daphne said. “But turn your phone around and show Bex those paintings, Freddie. She’d much rather see the art than our faces.”

“Nonsense, you are the art,” he said theatrically. “My beautiful bride.”

Daphne beamed at him moonily. Freddie was really committing to this. And thank goodness for that, because tomorrow, the press and the public would find out that Prince Frederick had placed King Hendrik-Alexander’s mother’s engagement ring—an orange tourmaline evoking the Dutch national color—on the Princess of Orange’s finger. The UK’s third in line to the throne now essentially belonged to the kingdom of the Netherlands.

I leaned in to try to see more details over their shoulders.

“Your palace is stunning, Daphne,” I said. “How do you not spend all day sitting in the middle of the floor? I wish I could climb through the screen. It makes me want to paint right now.”

Daphne grabbed the phone from Freddie and turned it on the Huis ten Bosch ballroom. The paneled walls and arches of the odd-shaped room were covered floor to ceiling with seventeenth-century paintings, with an octagonal viewing gallery in the center designed to let in light from the heavens. It was incredible, like living inside every piece of art all at once, and it was largely unknown because it wasn’t open to the public—but it would go down in history now as the site of Freddie’s and Daphne’s engagement portraits.

“We’ll sneak you in when you come for the wedding,” Daphne said. “If not sooner, perhaps? I suspect my parents will be planning a ridiculous number of events.”