Page 65 of Rivals
Then Sirivannavari was high-fiving her, and Bharat was twining glow necklaces around her neck, and they were all heading down the hall.
“You have a karaoke room on your yacht?” Sam was asking.
“Well, it’s also a golf simulator,” Alexei said, as if that made the whole thing more reasonable. “You can use it for any sport, really. A tennis simulator, or skiing…”
Beatrice smiled and let herself be swept along with the group. She felt giddy, unstoppable. She had gone up against monarchs far older and more experienced, and she had prevailed.
Maybe she was starting to get the hang of this queen thing after all.
The world must be turning upside down. There was no other explanation for the fact that Nina was pulling into the Deightons’ driveway: venturing deep into enemy territory, straight into the lion’s den. A month ago, if you’d told her that she would come to Daphne’shouse,Nina would have laughed in your face.
Before she could ring the bell, the door swung open.
“Nina. Hey.” Daphne sounded like she’d almost expected her to cancel. Nina had certainly considered it.
When they reached Daphne’s bedroom, she glanced around with anthropological curiosity. She’d expected something bland and traditional, but the room was full of surprises: a wooden desk that Nina recognized from a chain store because she had the exact same one; a lamp with a pebbled surface that looked vintage and somehow mermaidish. Three of the walls were white, but the fourth was a dusky blue-gray accent wall, its lines just uneven enough to suggest that Daphne had painted it herself.
On the bedside table, in the place of reverence where most girls kept their phones, Daphne had a stack of books. Nina saw one of the Kingmaker novels, a paperback thriller—which surprised her—and a copy ofMiddlemarch,which didn’t.
Then she registered her own thoughts and wondered when she’d developed an opinion on Daphne’s taste in literature.
Daphne gestured toward the armchair. But Nina decided to provoke Daphne, just a little, by plopping onto the bed instead, pulling one of the fluffy pillows into her lap. Daphne hesitated, then took the chair.
“I remember that trip.” Nina nodded at a photo on the bedside table, of Daphne and Jeff on the ski slopes. Actually, she felt like she’d seen the picture recently. Daphne had probably posted it as a #tbt or something.
“Oh, I—um, I forgot that photo was still out.” It was an odd thing for Daphne to say. She seemed to realize that, and hurried to recover. “It’s funny that you and I were both in Telluride, but we never really spoke to each other.”
“It’s notthatsurprising. I went out of my way to avoid you.”
There was a beat of awkward silence. Then Daphne said, “Because I was with Jefferson, and you were jealous?”
Yes,Nina thought, but there was no point in digging up old feelings. “Because you were so irritatingly perfect.”
Daphne made a strangled noise. “Please. You of all people know how far I am from perfect.”
“Look, there’s yet another thing we can agree on. We’re finding more and more of those these days,” Nina quipped. “What I meant was, youfit inon those trips, while I clearly didn’t. You had the right clothes; you knew the names of all those people at the New Year’s Eve party; you were even better atskiingthan I was.”
“You thought I fit in?” Daphne shook her head. “I was constantly checking my etiquette book, terrified that I would do or say the wrong thing.”
“At least youhadan etiquette book! Everything I learned about etiquette, I learned from Jane Austen.”
“That sentence should be the title of your memoir,” Daphne observed, and Nina surprised herself by chuckling.
It was strange to think that Daphne had been just as nervous on the Washingtons’ vacations. Daphne projected suchunassailable confidence that Nina had always assumed she was a spoiled aristocratic brat: that she was numb to the Washingtons’ staggering wealth, that the sight of liveried footmen around every corner was as commonplace to her as it was to the royal twins.
She was learning, now, that she’d been wrong about a lot of things. Maybe she should reexamine her tendency to make snap judgments about people and their backgrounds.
“Anyway. About Gabriella.” Nina felt suddenly desperate to get them back on task. It was disarming, sitting on Daphne’s bed like this, looking at photos as if they were normal people—as if they were friends.
“We need a new plan,” Daphne agreed.
“Should we break into her room again? It kills me that we don’t know what was on her computer,” Nina said, but Daphne shook her head.
“Even if we figured out a way to get inside, there’s no guarantee we would find anything. It’s too risky.”
“It was risky last time, and we did it then!”
“That was at a crowded party,” Daphne insisted. “How would we explain ourselves if we got caught?”
