Before she could say anything more, the French princess threw her arms around Beatrice in a hug.
Beatrice stiffened in momentary surprise, then hugged her back. She felt memories fighting to rise to the surface, but she couldn’t quite grab hold of them, as if they were fragments of plaster dissolving in water.
“Can we talk in private?” Louise asked when they stepped apart.
Beatrice nodded. “Take a seat,” she offered, but the princess shook her head.
“Not in your office! This isn’t a work meeting.” Louise grabbed her tote bag from the floor, and Beatrice heard the telltale clatter of a wine bottle. “I brought Sauternes,” Louise explained, with a wink. “Should we go outside?”
“It’s freezing!”
“So?” Louise replied, undaunted. “Or don’t you have an indoor pool?”
Which was how they ended up driving a golf cart, its sides zipped up in insulated plastic, past the orchard to the Washington family’s pool house. The twins used to bring groups of friends here, sneaking liquor in stainless-steel water bottles that didn’t fool the guards, though Beatrice had never been so daring.
Louise marched straight to the blue-tiled hot tub, yanking a sweatshirt over her head to reveal a ruffled bikini. “Do you have a bottle opener?” she asked, brandishing the bottle of wine.
Beatrice found a bottle opener in the wet bar, then grabbed a pair of wineglasses. “I can’t believe you packed a swimsuit,” she observed. “It’s the middle of winter.”
“I always pack a swimsuit; you never know when you’re going to need one.” A mischievous look entered Louise’s eyes as she added, “Alexei and I broke into a hotel’s hot tub, once, in Ibiza. Our rental house didn’t have one, and…well, it seemed necessary at the time.”
Alexei, the tsarevich of Russia. As Beatrice slipped into the hot tub, a memory rose in her mind, more like a conviction than a recollection of any specific moment. He and Louise were together.
“Tell me everything,” Louise commanded. “I have been so worried ever since the accident! And you hardly answered any of my texts! You’re an even worse correspondent than Bharat,” she added, visibly piqued.
“It’s a long story,” Beatrice said evasively, but Louise wasn’t deterred.
“Why do you think I brought wine? I want to hear the story in all its detail.” Louise began expertly uncorking the bottle, beads of condensation already forming along its side. She poured the honey-colored wine into the glasses and handed one to Beatrice.
Beatrice took a sip, and her eyes widened. “Is this wine or dessert?”
“I told you, it’s Sauternes. It’s wine and dessert.” Louise lifted an eyebrow. “You like it?”
“I think so.” It tasted rich and sweet, like apricot and butterscotch. Beatrice took another sip, letting the warmth of the wine settle somewhere below her collarbone.
Louise drained half her glass in a sip, then set it aside with a clink. “Is this about Teddy?”
Beatrice sensed that she could trust Louise. She wasn’t sure why she felt so convinced of this; she just seemed to know it, in the blind instinctive way you know when you are hungry, or that sunlight is good.
“Things have been a mess since my car accident.” Beatrice looked across the hot tub at Louise and took a breath. “I lost a year of memory.”
Her friend gasped in shock but didn’t interrupt. Beatrice explained everything: her amnesia, Ambrose Madison and his plot against her, and the ugly things he’d shouted at the rehearsal dinner tonight. She explained how she’d fallen in love with Teddy all over again, only to learn that they had been on the verge of a breakup the night of her accident.
When she finished talking, Louise’s blond hair was curling from the humidity, and she’d had to refill both of their wineglasses.
“No wonder you wrote such bland answers to my texts,” Louise said slowly. “I worried you didn’t want to be friends anymore, but now I understand, you didn’t remember that we are friends. Thank you for sharing all of that,” she added, seeming touched.
Beatrice fumbled to explain. “I know that you’re trustworthy. Even if I don’t remember the reasons why I came to believe that, the knowledge is still there. If that makes any kind of sense.”
“How very French of you.” A smile played around Louise’s lips, and she ran her hand through the bubbles that churned in the hot tub. “As for Madison, I always knew there was something off about him. The entire time he was your ambassador in my court, he was so…slimy.”
“Everyone heard him call me mentally damaged! Gossip like that always gets out, and if reporters find a way to dig into the hospital records, they’ll learn about my amnesia.”
Louise reached up to retie her hair, which was falling loose from its knot. “What if you try to get ahead of it? Tell America the truth: you suffered a head injury, but it hasn’t impacted your ability to rule.”
“You sound like Teddy.”
“I didn’t realize he wants you to go public, too,” Louise said meaningfully. “Was that why you fought earlier?”
Beatrice sank lower into the water, until it was nearly up to her neck. “It was about a much bigger issue,” she admitted. “The night of my accident, we weren’t in the same car because we had argued earlier that night—about the fact that Teddy doesn’t have a real job, that there’s nothing for him to do except support me.”
“And all those issues are still unresolved,” Louise finished for her.
“Exactly! How do I know that history won’t repeat itself? That he won’t get upset by the constraints of being king consort and run off when things get tough?”
“Oh, Béatrice. You cannot know that. You can never be certain of anything except your own decisions.”
“Well, that’s comforting,” Beatrice said drily.
Louise stared at her. “Sometimes you have to believe in things you can’t get proof of. It’s called faith. Like the way you knew you could trust me tonight,” she added. “That was faith, wasn’t it?”
“More like a memory I couldn’t grasp hold of,” Beatrice replied, but Louise’s words had given her pause.
Despite the Pledge of Allegiance she had recited thousands of times in her life, despite all the people who got on one knee before her and swore to serve her “in faith and loyalty,” Beatrice had never been good with the concept of faith. It felt too much like blind hope. She was her father’s daughter, and felt far more comfortable in the realm of facts and hard evidence.