“I’m not remotely ready to be Prince of Wales for real,” Nick confessed to me. “I thought we had years to go at our current level. I’d like to just worry about my grandmother, full stop, rather than boning up on all the logistics of what happens when she’s gone. It’s sickening.”

He seemed to have thrown off the hurt feelings that had begun to boil over at The Shard, in favor of devoting himself to whatever duties the new family order demanded of him. Prince Dick’s coronation was becoming less theoretical with every passing day, and he was out to remind everyone that Eleanor’s direct descendants—all of them, no matter what mind games he’d been putting Nick through before—were solid. It was undoubtedly easier to build Nick back up in this regard if the woman who had allegedly cuckolded him receded from view, so Richard immediately put me on the back burner. As we got deeper into October, the Daily Mail wrote a piece complimenting Nick’s stepped-up work schedule, and when I did the math, I realized he had caught up to Freddie’s pace from earlier in the summer. This felt too specific on Nick’s part to be coincidental, and as Freddie responded in kind, his stated resolve to introduce us to his new girlfriend had eroded. We had gotten nowhere. Sometimes in bed at night, Nick’s words ran through my head on a loop: Is there any coming back from this?