Freddie had seemed energized by ribbing the two of us at Hampton Court, but he’d shut down again as soon as we left. He hadn’t set foot inside Apartment 1A, and we’d learned nothing more about the mysterious Hannah beyond what we saw a week later in the papers, after he got papped hustling into Soho House with a brunette in a coat and pulled-down hat.

“Do you think we’re ever going to meet her?” I asked Nick one night as we clambered into the Den of Secrets.

“Do you think she’ll last long enough?” Nick asked, flopping down on his favorite pillows and pulling out a crossword. He liked doing them up there by candlelight (LED, so as not to burn down the monarchy in a literal sense).

“He’s definitely handling this differently, so maybe it’s serious.”

“That’d be a first,” Nick snarked. He rolled onto his stomach. “Can we please leave Freddie and all his bullshit downstairs?”

“But if you need to—”

“I don’t, Bex.” His forcefulness seemed to surprise even him. He softened. “And Sex Den is our time.”

I laughed off the tension. “It’s Den of Secrets, not Sex Den.”

“That seems like semantics,” Nick said. “But we should sort that out before I have the sign made.”

I watched him start to work on his crossword, as if the cloud had never passed over us. Since we’d come back, his resistance to discussing anything deeper than Georgina’s cavalcade of artifacts had only increased. If I pushed, he might freeze me out completely; if I let it go, I might miss a window. At a loss for answers, I started opening cabinets willy-nilly, as if the solution would fly out at me.

“Oooh, a feather boa.” I tossed it at Nick, who wrapped it around his neck without even looking up from his crossword. I picked up a small hardbound book that had fallen out along with two silk scarves and a loafer, and flipped through the pages. It appeared to be a diary.

“Hot damn,” I said. “Georgina lives.”

I opened to a random page near the middle, and read aloud: