Someone plugged their phone into an aux cord; Amber kicked off her shoes and began twirling a slow circle barefoot, laughing deliriously until Talal came and swept her off her feet. Sam felt a sudden rush of affection for them all.
“So? You really worked behind the bar tonight?” Liam asked.
“It went great. No problems at all,” she assured him before he could ask if she’d been recognized.
Perhaps that was the strangest thing about the entire night: that no one had realized who she was. It might have been the dim lighting, or the haircut and fedora, but Sam suspected that a huge factor was the fact that she’d been behind the bar rather than out in the crowd. Everyone had been so focused on getting their drinks and returning to the concert that they’d hardly glanced at her face—had looked through her, not at her.
“Hey, Martha!” Jessica called out, holding the phone that was plugged into the speakers. “What’s your favorite song?”
A giddy exhilaration coursed through Sam. Her entire life, people had made snap judgments about her—had decided what they thought of her before they even met her. It was such a relief to interact with someone without a host of preconceived notions and opinions in the way.
She hesitated a moment, then went to Jessica, who obediently passed her the phone. Sam kept scrolling until she found what she was looking for.
The opening notes of the song—a vibrant guitar riff, intercut with a saxophone—echoed through the room. A few people let out shouts of excitement or began laughing. “Do you remember…,” the entire room sang at once.
As the song built through the chorus, everyone’s voices drew out the last vowels: “Never was a cloudy dayyyy!”
Liam laughed approvingly. “I should have known you had good taste in music. Here’s to that,” he added, holding up his beer bottle to Sam’s.
Sam clinked her glass to his. “And to new beginnings,” she told him, smiling.
“Who is this?” Anju clicked to bring up another image on the projector.
Beatrice immediately recognized the person in the photo, though Anju was trying to trick her, using a picture of this young woman in leggings instead of a tiara. “That’s Princess Louise.” My friend, some part of her wanted to add, but she pursed her lips and said nothing.
This had happened a few times lately—a voice emerging from the depths of her, chiming in with a fact or opinion that left her conscious mind bewildered. Dr. Jacobs had assured her that it was a good sign.
He didn’t know how unsettling it felt: as if there was the ghost of another Beatrice, the one who’d gotten in the car accident, tangled within her.
She sighed and looked back up at the screen. She had been in this sitting room for an hour while Anju quizzed her on a collection of photos. According to Dr. Jacobs, seeing images of the people in her life would help reawaken the neural pathways that had fallen dormant.
At least it was more interesting than yesterday’s activity, when Anju had forced her to review vocabulary words. They had started at the fourth-grade level, then quickly made their way upward once Beatrice started using terms like Ruritanian and grandiloquence, hoping to make it stop. Delighted, Anju had switched tacks and started quizzing Beatrice in French and German, all of which she’d passed with flying colors.
If only she could summon her own memories as easily as she could vocabulary words in foreign languages.
Anju clicked to another slide. “And who is this?”
The young man in the photo looked familiar, with bright blue eyes, thick blond hair, and broad shoulders. A memory hovered at the edge of Beatrice’s mind, as if someone was waving a Polaroid photo maddeningly out of reach…. She saw a cozy sectional couch, a video-game remote in her hand; and, perhaps most strangely of all, she felt a buoyant joy in her chest, the sort of carefree childish joy she hadn’t felt in a long time….
Beatrice closed her eyes, willing the snapshot to come into clearer focus, but it had already dissolved.
She looked back up to see Anju watching her carefully. Her gaze turned to the young man in the image once more. Come to think of it, he looked a lot like Teddy.
“That’s Teddy’s brother,” she guessed. “Lewis?”
“Very good!”
Beatrice squirmed guiltily at the thought of Teddy. He’d been trying to see her ever since she’d come back to the palace, but she’d managed to avoid him thus far, cowardly as it was.
“Anju,” she asked abruptly, “have you made any progress on finding Connor Markham?”
Anju’s brows drew together, but she quickly smoothed her expression. Perhaps she’d started to suspect why Beatrice was asking about him.
“He seems to have left the capital, and I can’t find a forwarding address. I’m happy to outsource this to a private investigator, or ask around among the other Guards, but I was under the impression that you wanted this to stay between us.”
“Yes,” Beatrice said quickly. The last thing she wanted was some PI digging through her history with Connor. “Just keep searching, and let me know once you find anything. I think we’re done for today,” she added, and Anju nodded in understanding.
Beatrice stood, her mind spinning with half-formed thoughts. At first it had felt strange to be in the palace without Connor, but so many things were off-balance right now—the loss of her father, the disorienting fact of being queen, the wary scrutiny with which the media was studying her. Connor’s absence was just one small part of the wrongness that seemed to confront her at every turn.
She stepped out into the hall, only to slow at the sound of jangling up ahead. Moments later, Teddy turned the corner, a yellow lab trotting along after him.
Beatrice wanted to turn around, pretend she hadn’t seen him, but a cautious smile had already risen to Teddy’s face. And the dog leapt toward her so eagerly that Beatrice couldn’t help going to meet him, kneeling down to rub her hands behind her ears.
“Hello there.” Beatrice chuckled as the lab covered her face with sloppy kisses. “Who are you?”
When the silence had stretched for a beat too long, she looked up at Teddy. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “This is Franklin, Bee. You and I adopted him together.”
That was when she noticed that Franklin’s dog tag was monogrammed with two simple letters: BR. Her monogram—Beatrice Regina.
“We got a dog?” The words came out in a whisper.
“He’s more your dog than mine. Probably because you slip him treats all the time.” Teddy hesitated. “He’s really missed you. I was going to bring him by sooner, but I figured that with everything else going on, you didn’t have time to…”