She’ll be alone. I don’t want to leave her alone.
Blinking away a sudden burn at the back of her eyes, Sylvie cleared her throat. “According to Rosie, Jessica decided she couldn’t live the life of a royal, that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
“She tormented herself over it.” Kathleen was still clutching Sylvie’s phone tightly. “She came to see me one night, in tears. I’d never seen her like that. I think she had to talk to someone, and there was nobody else she could trust. She’d seen how the press treated his previous girlfriends, you see. How the public tore their lives wide open. Eyes always on you. Scrutinizing every gesture, every outfit, every word. How many marriages in that family have survived with any love and happiness left intact? She’d walked away from him that day, and it was like part of her had died. The light in her eyes just . . . gone.”
They were all very quiet. Instinctively, Sylvie slipped her hand sideways and back into Dominic’s. She sensed him look at her, before his fingers tightened around hers.
“She didn’t sleep a wink that night. She barely slept at all for four days,” Kathleen went on. “Finally, five nights after she’d left him, I came here with her to Primrose Cottage, as it was then, and we lay out in the petunia field until dawn. I think she needed to be here, where she’d always found solace. And where she’d been happy with him.” She exhaled shakily again, running her fingers over the image of her sister’s face. “I remember dozing, waking on and off, and seeing her looking up at the sky. At some point, she stopped crying, and this look came over her face. I could hear her voice, just a breath in the breeze. We can do it. That was all she said.”
She lifted her head and looked at them. “She would have been brilliant. Whatever situation life threw her into. And she adored him. I knew from the moment she turned up on the doorstep that she’d never be able to go through with it. She always would have chosen him, in the end.”
It took a second for that to register, and Sylvie saw Dominic’s own head lift.
Pet had been sitting quietly, one hand tucked against her cheek as she listened, but she pushed forward in her chair now. “You mean she changed her mind? She went back to him?”
“She was going back to him. That day.” Kathleen’s jaw worked. Her voice had the hoarseness of one who still, even after all this time, didn’t quite believe the reality of loss. “Once she’d made the decision, it was like she’d . . . ignited. She was Jessie again, so excited and determined to see him right away. She packed a bag and left. I still remember her grabbing my face and kissing me, laughing.” Her fingers flexed on the phone. “She was forty minutes outside of London when a truck slid out of control in an intersection. The cab smashed into the driver’s-side door. She died before they could cut her from the wreckage.”
There were tears on Pet’s cheeks, and Sylvie felt the wetness under her own lashes. Dominic covered their linked fingers with his other hand.
“I tried to get in touch with Patrick, but I didn’t have any direct way to contact him.” Kathleen took a creased hankie from a voluminous pocket and scrubbed over her eyes. “If Jessie ever wrote down his number, I never found it, and obviously you can’t just call the palace and ask to speak to the prince. We’d already had the funeral before I finally managed to speak to a royal aide, who—” Her voice cracked. “Who passed on the palace’s deepest condolences and proceeded to politely fob me off. First, he wouldn’t believe that Jessie had even known Patrick, and then when I wouldn’t give up, he—he made it sound as if there were other women, that Patrick had any number of casual relationships on the go. I was only eighteen, and he was so . . . matter-of-fact about it.”
Something in her expression became almost childlike, the confused, grieving teenage girl she’d once been.
“I believed him,” Kathleen said. All that chilled nothingness fell away, leaving her voice raw with grief. “I thought Patrick had just been a typical playboy prince, leading Jessie on. Making her believe she’d found this great love, when really, he wouldn’t even care that much that she’d—that she’d died. I was so angry for so long. I kept remembering her face that day when she was getting in the car. The weeks before then, when she was literally dancing as she walked. The months on end she spent making a sculpture for him, ignoring all her other work—she was the most incredible artist, did you know? Bronze, stone, glass, ceramic. She could draw the beauty out of anything.”
She was speaking rapidly, changing course and continuing before anyone could reply. “She said he’d put it in his favorite part of the gardens at St. Giles Palace, the only place he could sit and think and be. It was his petunia field, she said. And after that conversation with the aide, I thought, It’s all a lie. Jessie spent hours and hours making the mold for that bronze, and he probably just threw it in a cupboard. Just another dusty old relic in some dreary abandoned room.”
The stream of words came to a halt. Kathleen’s callused fingers were shaking as she stroked the sides of Sylvie’s phone, staring down again at that photograph. At the transparent emotion on Patrick’s face, the way his body naturally curved toward Jessica’s.
“It wasn’t true, was it?” The tears streamed down her face, and Pet got up and went to crouch at her side. She rested her hand on the older woman’s wrist, rubbing gently in comfort. Kathleen lifted her eyes to meet Sylvie’s. “He did love her.”
“He loved her very much.” Sylvie was squeezing Dominic’s fingers tightly. “There was no one else. Only Jessie, for all of his life.” She hesitated. “He never knew that she’d changed her mind, that she was coming back to him.”
“Patrick notoriously hated the interference of senior advisors. If the aide you spoke to told him anything of that conversation, and that’s not a given, he may have persuaded Patrick that Jessica’s family wanted nothing to do with him. Perhaps that you blamed him for her state of mind that week,” Dominic put in grimly. “Probably assuming the prince would move on faster if all lingering ties were cut. A clean break. From everything I’ve heard of Patrick, if he was informed of Jessica’s death then, I can’t understand why he wouldn’t have come to see you, unless he believed he was respecting your own wishes.”
Sylvie was mentally replaying her conversation with Rosie. The princess had spoken of her uncle mourning Jessie all his life. Mourning her loss, her absence in his life. Rosie had never specifically mentioned her death. Slowly, she said, “He may not have known anything about any of it. She’d told him she had to leave, and he’d done the last thing—the only thing—he could do for her. He let her cut contact between them completely, so she could go and live the life that he thought would make her happiest in the end. A bird that was always meant to soar.”
Kathleen made an audible gulping sound, the fingers of one hand curled against the brooch at her breast. It was a beautiful little bronze piece, two entwined hearts. A gift from a very talented, affectionate sister? “Oh God,” she said, and her face crumpled. “That poor man.” With another sudden sob, she clutched Pet’s hand. “But I’m so . . . To know that she did find that sort of love, that she lived in perfect happiness even for a short time, and it was real and true . . .”