“Am not.” She yanks a blanket from her pile of belongings, turning her back to Alex and wrapping it around her. “Don’t speak to me for the next six hours. I deserve a fucking nap.”
“Wait, wait, okay, wait,” Alex says. “I have one question.”
She sighs heavily. “What?”
“Why’d you wait to use Shaan’s personal number?”
“Because he’s my fiancé, asshole, but some of us understand the meaning of discretion, so you wouldn’t know about it,” she tells him without even so much as looking at him, curled up against the window of the plane. “We agreed we’d never use our personal numbers for work contact. Now shut up and let me get some sleep before we have to deal with the rest of this. I’m running on nothing but black coffee, a Wetzel’s Pretzel, and a fistful of B12. Do not even breathe in my direction.”
* * *
It’s not Henry but Bea who answers when Alex knocks on the closed door of the music room on the second floor of Kensington.
“I told you to stay away—” Bea is saying as soon as the door is open, brandishing a guitar over her shoulder. She drops it as soon as she sees him. “Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry, I thought you were Philip.” She scoops him up with her free hand into a surprisingly bone-crushing hug. “Thank God you’re here, I was about to come get you myself.”
When she releases him, he’s finally able to see Henry behind her, slumped on the settee with a bottle of brandy. He smiles at Alex, weakly, and says, “Bit short for a stormtrooper.”
Alex’s laugh comes out half sob, and it’s impossible to know if he moves first or if Henry does, but they meet in the middle of the room, Henry’s arms around Alex’s neck, swallowing him up. If Henry’s voice on the phone was a tether, his body is the gravity that makes it possible, his hand gripping the back of Alex’s neck a magnetic force, a permanent compass north.
“I’m sorry,” is what comes out of Alex’s mouth, miserably, earnestly, muffled against Henry’s throat. “It’s my fault. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Henry releases him, hands on his shoulders, jaw set. “Don’t you dare. I’m not sorry for a thing.”
Alex laughs again, incredulous, looking into the heavy circles under Henry’s eyes and the chewed-up bottom lip and, for the first time, seeing a man born to lead a nation.
“You’re unbelievable,” Alex says. He leans up and kisses the underside of his jaw, finding it rough from a full, fitful day without a shave. He pushes his nose, his cheek into it, feels some of the tension sap out of Henry at the touch. “You know that?”
They find their way onto the lush purples and reds of the Persian rugs on the floor, Henry’s head in Alex’s lap and Bea on a pouf, plucking away at a weird little instrument she tells Alex is called an autoharp. Bea pulls over a tiny table and sets out crackers and a little chunk of soft cheese and takes away the brandy bottle.
From the sound of it, the queen is absolutely livid—not just to finally have confirmation about Henry, but because it’s via something as undignified as a tabloid scandal. Philip drove in from Anmer Hall the minute the news broke and has been rebuffed by Bea every time he tries to get near Henry for what he says “will simply be a stern discussion about the consequences of his actions.” Catherine has been by, once, three hours ago, stone-faced and sad, to tell Henry that she loves him and he could have told her sooner.
“And I said, ‘That’s great, Mum, but as long as you’re letting Gran keep me trapped, it doesn’t mean a fucking thing,’” Henry says. Alex stares down at him, shocked and a little impressed. Henry rests an arm over his face. “I feel awful. I was—I dunno. All the times she should have been there the past few years, it caught up to me.”
Bea sighs. “Maybe it was the kick in the arse she needs. We’ve been trying to get her to do anything for years since Dad.”
“Still,” Henry says. “The way Gran is—Mum isn’t to blame for that. And she did manage to protect us, before. It’s not fair.”
“H,” Bea says firmly. “It’s hard, but she needed to hear it.” She looks down at the little buttons of the autoharp. “We deserve to have one parent, at least.”
The corner of her mouth pinches, so much like Henry’s.
“Are you okay?” Alex asks her. “I know I—I saw a couple articles…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. “The Powder Princess” was the fourth-highest Twitter trend ten hours ago.
Her frown twitches into a half-smile. “Me? Honestly, it’s almost a relief. I’ve always said that the most comfortable I could be is everyone knowing my story upfront, so I don’t have hear the speculations or lie to cover the truth—or explain it. I’d rather it, you know, hadn’t been this way. But here we are. At least now I can stop acting as if it’s something to be ashamed of.”
“I know the feeling,” Henry says softly.
The quiet ebbs and flows after a while, the London night black and pressing in against the windowpanes. David the beagle curls up protectively at Henry’s side, and Bea picks a Bowie song to play. She sings under her breath, “I, I will be king, and you, you will be queen,” and Alex almost laughs. It feels like how Zahra has described hurricane days to him: stuck together, hoping the sandbags will hold.
Henry drifts asleep at some point, and Alex is thankful for it, but he can still feel tension in every part of Henry’s body against him.
“He hasn’t slept since the news,” Bea tells him quietly.
Alex nods slightly, searching her face. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“I feel like he’s not telling me something,” Alex whispers. “I believe him when he says he’s in, and he wants to tell everyone the truth. But there’s something else he’s not saying, and it’s freaking me out that I can’t figure out what it is.”
Bea looks up, her fingers stilling. “Oh, love,” she says simply. “He misses Dad.”
Oh.
He sighs, putting his head in his hands. Of course.
“Can you explain?” he attempts lamely. “What that’s like? What I can do?”
She shifts on her pouf, repositioning the harp onto the floor, and reaches into her sweater. She withdraws a silver coin on a chain: her sobriety chip.
“D’you mind if I go a bit sponsor?” she asks with a smirk. He offers her a weak half smile, and she continues.
“So, imagine we’re all born with a set of feelings. Some are broader or deeper than others, but for everyone, there’s that ground floor, a bottom crust of the pie. That’s the maximum depth of feeling you’ve ever experienced. And then, the worst thing happens to you. The very worst thing that could have happened. The thing you had nightmares about as a child, and you thought, it’s all right because that thing will happen to me when I’m older and wiser, and I’ll have felt so many feelings by then that this one worst feeling, the worst possible feeling, won’t seem so terrible.
“But it happens to you when you’re young. It happens when your brain isn’t even fully done cooking—when you’ve barely experienced anything, really. The worst thing is one of the first big things that ever happens to you in your life. It happens to you, and it goes all the way down to the bottom of what you know how to feel, and it rips it open and carves out this chasm down below to make room. And because you were so young, and because it was one of the first big things to happen in your life, you’ll always carry it inside you. Every time something terrible happens to you from then on, it doesn’t just stop at the bottom—it goes all the way down.”