Nick apologized profusely once the party wound down and we were curled up in the floral fiasco that was our master bedroom. He said all the expected things—he was deranged from lack of sleep, he loved me, he had not meant to sideline my birthday—and I knew he meant them, but none of it got to the heart of why I was upset. Simply put, I was embarrassed, both by him and for him. He and Freddie had sounded like the worst, most shallow versions of themselves—which I told him, sharply, and he agreed, before giving me my birthday present: a case of Cubs-branded wine and two shatterproof glasses for drinking it on our terrace. It seemed bitchy to keep yelling at him after that.

But as Nick fell more deeply into work, I fretted that he’d sidestepped my point instead of absorbing it. He accepted assignments like he was on a mission to out-king the regent himself, and when Richard responded by putting Freddie out on the trail in kind, it redoubled Nick’s desire to keep his nose to the royal grindstone. My hat was off to Prince Dick: He knew how to keep both his sons at a boil that suited his PR needs. If this was a snapshot of how Richard would run things when he really was king, the whole line would die out of exhaustion. It made me doubly antsy because of how far Nick and Freddie and I were drifting away from each other; it wasn’t so much two and one anymore, as Freddie had once described our former trio to me, but more like one and one and one—three points of a triangle with so much empty space in between.

Instead of cracking skulls to get everyone in sync again, I decided to take a warmer, fuzzier tack. I hadn’t celebrated a proper Thanksgiving in England since the year Nick and I first hooked up, when I’d gone to meet him at Windsor Castle and he’d ended a private tour—and accordingly, the platonic portion of our relationship—with a feast he’d arranged based on my family specialties. Maybe a flashback to that would remind Nick of a time when things were simpler and better. So I laid enough of a sob story on Marj that she felt either sorry for me or sick of me, and pulled strings to make sure Nick had Thanksgiving off. I then called my mom for cooking advice.

“Remember to take out the plastic bag of giblets,” she’d said, once she stopped laughing at the idea of me throwing a dinner party for which I actually cooked. “On our first Thanksgiving together, your father forgot, and the entire apartment smelled so foul that we went to the Holiday Inn for a week.”