She reaches across the tiny tea table and the sad little pile of water crackers and touches the back of Alex’s hand.
“Do you understand?” she asks him, looking right into his eyes. “You need to understand this to be with Henry. He is the most loving, nurturing, selfless person you could hope to meet, but there is a sadness and a hurt in him that is tremendous, and you may very well never truly understand it, but you need to love it as much as you love the rest of him, because that’s him. That is him, part and parcel. And he is prepared to give it all to you, which is far more than I ever, in a thousand years, thought I would see him do.”
Alex sits, trying for a long moment to absorb it, and says, “I’ve never … I haven’t been through anything like that,” he says, voice rough. “But I’ve always felt it, in him. There’s this side of him that’s … unknowable.” He takes a breath. “But the thing is, jumping off cliffs is kinda my thing. That’s the choice. I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.”
Bea smiles gently. “Then you’ll do fine.”
Sometime around four in the morning, he climbs into bed behind Henry, Henry whose spine pokes out in soft points, Henry who has been through the worst thing and now the next worst thing and is still alive. He reaches out a hand and touches the ridge of Henry’s shoulder blade, the skin where the sheet has slid off him, where his lungs stubbornly refuse to stop pulling air. Six feet of boy curled around kicked-in ribs and a recalcitrant heart.
Carefully, his chest to Henry’s back, he slots himself into place.
* * *
“It’s foolishness, Henry,” Philip is saying. “You’re too young to understand.”
Alex’s ears are ringing.
They sat down in Henry’s kitchen this morning with scones and a note from Bea that she’d gone to meet with Catherine. And then suddenly, Philip was bursting through the door, suit askew, hair uncombed, shouting at Henry about the nerve to break the communications embargo, to bring Alex here while the palace is being watched, to keep embarrassing the family.
Presently, Alex is thinking about breaking his nose with the coffee percolator.
“I’m twenty-three, Philip,” Henry says, audibly struggling to keep his voice even. “Mum was barely more than that when she met Dad.”
“Yes, and you think that was a wise decision?” Philip says nastily. “Marrying a man who spent half our childhoods making films, who never served his country, who got sick and left us and Mum—”
“Don’t, Philip,” Henry says. “I swear to God. Just because your obsession with family legacy didn’t impress him—”
“You clearly don’t know the first fucking thing about what a legacy means if you can let something like this happen,” Philip snaps. “The only thing to do now is bury it and hope that somehow people will believe that none of it was real. That’s your duty, Henry. It’s the least you can do.”
“I’m sorry,” Henry says, sounding wretched, but there’s a bitter defiance rising in him too. “I’m sorry that I’m such a disgrace for being the way I am.”
“I don’t care if you’re gay,” Philip says, dropping that big fat if like Henry hasn’t already specifically told him. “I care that you’ve made this choice, with him”—he cuts his eyes sharply to Alex as if he finally exists in the same room as this conversation—“someone with a fucking target on his back, to be so stupid and naive and selfish as to think it wouldn’t completely fuck us all.”
“I knew, Philip. Christ,” Henry says. “I knew it could ruin everything. I was terrified of exactly this. But how could I have predicted? How?”
“As I said, naive,” Philip tells him. “This is the life we live, Henry. You’ve always known it. I’ve tried to tell you. I wanted to be a good brother to you, but you don’t bloody listen. It’s time to remember your place in this family. Be a man. Stand up and take responsibility. Fix this. For once in your life, don’t be a coward.”
Henry flinches like he’s been physically slapped. Alex can see it now—this is how he was broken down over the years. Maybe not always as explicitly, but always there, always implied. Remember your place.
And he does the thing Alex loves so much: He sticks his chin out, steeling himself up. “I’m not a coward,” he says. “And I don’t want to fix it.”
Philip slants a harsh, humorless laugh at him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t possibly know.”
“Fuck off, Philip, I love him,” Henry says.
“Oh, you love him, do you?” It’s so patronizing that Alex’s hand twitches into a fist under the table. “What exactly do you intend to do, then, Henry? Hmm? Marry him? Make him the Duchess of Cambridge? The First Son of the United bloody States, fourth in line to be Queen of England?”
“I’ll fucking abdicate!” Henry says, voice rising. “I don’t care!”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Philip spits back.
“We have a great uncle who abdicated because he was a fucking Nazi, so it’d hardly be the worst reason anyone’s done it, would it?” Henry’s yelling now, and he’s out of his chair, hands shaking, towering over Philip, and Alex notices that he’s actually taller. “What are we even defending here, Philip? What kind of legacy? What kind of family, that says, we’ll take the murder, we’ll take the raping and pillaging and the colonizing, we’ll scrub it up nice and neat in a museum, but oh no, you’re a bloody poof? That’s beyond our sense of decorum! I’ve bloody well had it. I’ve sat about long enough letting you and Gran and the weight of the damned world keep me pinned, and I’m finished. I don’t care. You can take your legacy and your decorum and you can shove it up your fucking arse, Philip. I’m done.”
He huffs out an almighty breath, turns on his heel, and stalks out of the kitchen.
Alex, mouth hanging open, remains frozen in his seat for a few seconds. Across from him, Philip is looking red-faced and queasy. Alex clears his throat, stands, and buttons his jacket.
“For what it’s worth,” he says to Philip, “that is the bravest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
And he leaves too.
* * *
Shaan looks like he hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours. Well, he looks perfectly composed and groomed, but the tag is sticking out of his sweater and the strong smell of whiskey is emanating from his tea.
Next to him, in the back of the incognito van they’re taking to Buckingham Palace, Zahra has her arms folded resolutely. The engagement ring on her left hand glints in the muted London morning.
“So, uh,” Alex attempts. “Are you two in a fight now?”
Zahra looks at him. “No. Why would you think that?”
“Oh. I just thought because—”
“It’s fine,” Shaan says, still typing on his iPhone. “This is why we set rules about the personal-slash-professional lines at the outset of the relationship. It works for us.”
“If you want a fight, you should have seen it when I found out he had known about you two all along,” Zahra says. “Why do you think I got a rock this big?”