Page 98 of The Heir Apparent
I drank, and the coffee was as perfect as everything else in his apartment.
“So,” he said. “Tonight. Why don’t we go out? I know it’s tricky, but we can go to Oswald’s. It’s private there. Members only. No one will bother us or take pictures.”
“I’ve got a reception at the palace tonight,” I said. “I organised it myself. It’s for a clinic in Nairobi that treats obstetric fistula.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a serious childbirth injury. It mostly happens to girls who are too young to be pregnant. Prolonged labour can seriously damage the wall of the birth canal and—”
He grimaced and laughed, waving a hand in front of his face. “I get the picture.”
While I had become something of a derelict princess in recent months, I still cared deeply about my patronages, so I’d thrown myself headlong into planning the reception. The clinic’s board members were already in London ahead of the event, and the city’s wealthiest and most powerful residents had RSVPed yes. There was one person who would not be there, though. Six weeks earlier, Mary had asked me to go over the guest list one more time before we sent out the invitations. I drew my finger down her leather binder, slowing to a stop when I reached Jack’s name. I tried to imagine what would happen if I let it slip through so that the stiff cream invite made its way around the world, landing in the pile of mail on the kitchen bench back home. Would he see it as an entreaty? A cruel tease? I picked up a pencil and crossed him out.
“Mr. Jennings is no longer able to attend,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Afterwards, I locked myself in a stall in the ladies’ room and silently wept into my hands. Just for a moment. It was all I would allow myself.
Colin was polishing the steel of his coffee machine until it glowed. “Come here after the reception if you like.”
I smiled thinly. “I would, I just haven’t seen my dog in a few days, and I think I should.”
“Lou’s pointer? Bring him round.”
“That dog inthisapartment? I’m sweating just imagining him on all these neutral furnishings.”
He laughed, but it was a hollow sound. “Well, I won’t presume to invite myself to Cumberland. I’m not sure Amira would want me hanging around her house anyway.”
I felt a familiar twinge of something I had not been able to name for months. I was beginning to see that for the duration of my time in London, everyone around me had been cloaking themselves in falsehoods, giving me only a fraction of the truth, so that I was no longer sure who to believe.
“What’s the problem between you two?”
There was a strange expression on his face. “I don’t have a problem with her. I’m not sure she really liked any of Louis’s friends, to be honest.”
“She told me she invited you to a dinner party at their house and you showed up with a new girlfriend, but you hadn’t broken up with the old one yet, and she was there too, and it was very awkward.”
“What?” He looked startled, and then rolled his eyes. “That’s not… I didn’t do that. That’s not how it went down.”
I shrugged. “I’m not judging. But maybe that’s why she’s… I don’t know, ambivalent.”
He studied my face. “Has she warned you off me?”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure what Amira wanted for me anymore. She was frighteningly unsentimental when it came to marriage and repeatedly insisted there was no better match for me than Colin. But the possibility that I might go through with it seemed to leave her bereft.
“Look, she’s your friend, but… I don’t know,” he said, throwing up his hands. “There’s people like us and there’s people like her.”
“Sorry?”
He rolled his eyes again, clearly frustrated with me. “I’m not talking about skin colour. It’s just… you’ve met her parents. Her mother engineered that whole thing with Lou. She dug her claws into him, and she pushed them together. I don’t know if Amira even wanted him. I mean, she wasn’t faithful to him, that’s for sure.”
I sat very still on my stool while Colin pinched the bridge of his nose. I thought of her simmering resentment, the way she seemed to know everything about him, how quiet she had been on the drive home from our weekend at Lutton Hall.
“That’s just what I heard,” he muttered. “Anyway, let’s drop it.”
“It was Amira,” I said slowly. “The girl at the dinner party who had to sit across the table from you and your new girlfriend. You and Amira were together.”
The howl of an ambulance filled the apartment as it careened past. Once it faded, we sat in the yawning silence. His arms were folded over his chest as he stared at the floor.
