Chapter 38 #2
Early March is smack in the middle of the rainy season in Emarvia, and usually I would throw on a rain jacket when I go out for a run this time of year, but I don’t even bother today.
My clothes are soaked by the third mile, and I don’t care.
Water drips down my forehead and nose, my hair is a heavy knot on top of my head, but I can’t stop, even to pull it into a quick braid.
If I stop, then my brain catches up, and I won’t be able to think, move, or breathe.
Five miles in my phone rings. I ignore it and keep pushing, keep moving, keep my focus on foot to pavement.
But then my phone rings again. And again.
After the fourth time, I can’t ignore it anymore.
A picture of Darcy and Liam at the duck pond lights up my screen as I find an overhang to stand under, and my heart crumbles because those kids are everything.
“Lady Maier,” I answer, breathing heavily.
“Aurelia, where are you? What’s wrong?”
“Running,” is all I can manage through my panting.
“Are you alright? I heard a rumor through the grapevine.” Her gossip network is legendary, but even this is quick.
“Which one?”
“About your aunt’s estate. Aurelia, are you sure you’re okay? You sound like you’re dying over there.”
“Might’ve pushed… A little... Hard,” I puff out.
“This is a huge ordeal you’re going through right now, and I’m concerned. You know you have become one of ours this past year. And I want to be here for you if you need me.”
I don’t say anything for a moment between still catching my breath and trying not to have an absolute breakdown. Finally, I croak, “What am I going to do?”
“First, you’re going to send me your location so I can call you a taxi,” Lady Maier says, slipping into no-nonsense, get-stuff-done mode. “Next, you call Margaret LaFleur and tell her to meet you here. Then, we drink lots of wine.”
I glance around to catch my bearings. “I’m not far away, actually. I’ll just run.”
“In this rain? You’re crazy. Let me get you a cab, please.”
“No, it’s fine, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Lady Maier says something about pneumonia and insanity as she hangs up.
I pull up my text thread with Margaret.
Meet me at the Maiers’ soonest. SOS
That girl is practically glued to her phone, so I don’t even wait for a response before I slip my phone back in my pocket and punish my body for two more miles to my employer’s house. Well, maybe not my employers for much longer.
I make it in the side door that leads into the mud room before falling flat on my back on the cold tile. My chest heaves, and my vision is a little dark on the edges. Then a face in a blonde halo comes into view, out of focus and upside down, but I’d recognize that button nose anywhere.
“Whatchu doing on the floor, Aurelia?”
“Trying to remember how to breathe, Darcy, my love.” My eyes are slowly starting to work again, and I catch the very adorable, confused look on her face.
“You forgot how to breave?”
Laughing at the cutest little girl in the world, I push myself to sit up. I hold my arms out to her, and she wraps me in a tight hug. God, I love this kid, the other one too, wherever he is. She steps back when I let her go, looking down at her pink dress that now has a damp spot on the front.
“You got me all wet,” she giggles.
“Meh, just a little.” The muscles in my legs quiver as I stand, but I somehow make them work. I kick off my wet shoes and leave my equally soaked socks on top of them next to the door. “Is your mother in her parlor?”
The little girl grabs my hand. “Yep. T’mon, I’ll take you.”
“Do we say yep, Darcy?” I’m not sure where she got the word from, but it’s one we’ve been working on.
“I mean, yes,” she says with an exaggerated groan as she pulls me along with her into the main part of the house.
Lady Maier already has a glass of red wine in hand and an open bottle of white on ice on the coffee table.
“Thank you, love,” her mother calls from the sofa. “Will you please tell Gan-Gan we’ll have two more for dinner tonight?”
“Yes, Momma.” She skips from the room, curls bouncing all the way down the hall.
I pour myself a glass of wine and drop rather ungracefully onto the sofa situated across from Lady Maier. I take a long, steadying drink and am about to start dumping everything when the doorbell rings. I move to stand, but Lady Maier waves me off.
“I’ll get that, dear. You pour yourself some more. You look like you need it.”
I can hear chattering at the front door just down the hall, and my best friend’s voice is unmistakable. She rushes into the room and stops short when she sees me slumped on the couch but apparently well.
She places her hands on her hips and cocks an eyebrow at me. “I heard the news through the rumor mill, too, Countess Graf. Why didn’t you call me right away?”
I drop my head back against the sofa and groan. “Ugh! Because I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Lady Maier has settled herself back on the sofa and takes up her glass again. Margaret folds herself delicately on the couch next to me.
“Whatever do you mean?”
I spill everything, all the thoughts and ideas and questions that had been scrambling around in my mind since the meeting with the solicitor.
My worries about my education, the fear of taking on this huge title and estate with no understanding of how any of this peerage stuff actually works, what this all means for the life I had been so carefully curating.
“You’re leaving out one major factor,” Margaret says with a smirk after I’ve finished laying it all out.
“What’s that?”
“If you take this title, you can have a shot at the prince.”
I groan. “Oh no! I’m not going down that road again.”
“What road?” Lady Maier cuts in. “What am I missing here?”
“Aurelia and Prince Friedrich were seeing each other for a little while.”
“Emphasis on little. And Margaret, what makes you think he actually wants me? We only did what we did because we knew it would be a short-term kind of thing.”
Lady Maier is sitting on the edge of the sofa now, bent with her arms on her knees. “Wait a minute. That actually happened?”
I blink at her. “I’m sorry, what?”
“He asked for your phone number, like, ages ago. And then you made allusions to him only once, and then I never heard anything else. I just assumed nothing ever came of it.”
Margaret scoffs. “Rebecca, you are the biggest gossip in the peerage. How did you just let something like that go?”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I cut in. “Because it’s over now.”
Lady Maier is almost trembling. My employer is normally so cool and composed. I’ve never seen her like this before. “Girl, not for him it isn’t.”
Margaret holds up a hand. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve known Fritz since we were kids. My father was Lord Chamberlain for years when I was growing up.
I can read that man like a book. I saw him at the charity football thing a few weeks ago and knew something was up.
But he was being very cryptic and asking questions about my marriage with Dietrich and marriage in general.
Then he asked if it was possible to have a happy marriage if he was in love with someone else. ”
“That doesn’t mean it’s me.” I gnaw the corner of my lip. I can’t let these two hopeless romantics get to my head. I almost fell back under his spell last weekend, and it would be all too easy to let my heart start rationalizing my feelings for him once again.
“Coupled with the way he was looking at you at Lady Graf’s funeral,” Margaret says, refilling the wine glass that I’ve been emptying at an alarming rate.
I gulp down more wine to try and quell the traitorous fluttering taking up residence in my chest. “You’re both wrong. I overheard him on his phone during that party.”
“Even if he said the very words ‘I’m not in love with Aurelia Sumner’ I’d still argue that he’s continuing to harbor some huge feelings for you,” Margaret says.
“No, but whoever he was talking to, he kept calling dear and dearest. And he said I love you to her.” It hurt more than I care to admit hearing him say those things so soon after things ended with us, but as I keep reminding myself, that’s never what we were about.
Even if he did drop the big L word right before we did the nasty on the floor of the altar of a church and then promptly broke up afterwards.
But that wasn’t a real profession of love, right?
Lady Maier is chuckling as she pours more red for herself.
“What?” This feeling that everyone else knows something I don’t is getting really old.
“Sweetheart.” She comes to sit on the edge of the sofa next to me and takes my hand. “Dearest is what the family calls Anneliese. He was talking to his sister.”
All other thoughts in my head come to a screeching halt. Everything else is quiet in the face of one potential truth. Friedrich might still have feelings for me. And I can’t bring myself to say it out loud, but I still have some strong ones for him, too.
“I don’t know, y’all. That’s a lot to risk on a big if. If he still has feelings for me. If he wants to give a real relationship a try. If he doesn’t, then I’ve just changed my whole life and there’s no going back.”
Lady Maier is still holding my hand. Her voice is soft and assuring, exactly how I wished my own mother would have spoken to me after dad left, when all that business with the church went down, when I was grappling with plans for my future.
“Don’t change your life for him, Aurelia.
Do it for you. Think of all the good you can do as the new Countess Graf.
You can continue your aunt’s charity work.
Maybe even begin some of your own. You will have a voice in government simply because of the weight your title brings.
Imagine the perspective you can bring to the table.
You will be a rockstar to young girls across the country, a strong female role model for them to look up to. ”
“Yes, all those things,” Margaret chimes in. “And if things don’t work out with the prince, you’ve still got this amazing new life you never even imagined.”
I turn back to my employer. “Yeah, but I really like the life I’ve got going right now. I love being a nanny, and I love your children.”
“Aurelia, what made you want to become a nanny?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I really love children, I guess.
I was always sad being an only child; it was lonely, and I decided I wanted lots of kids when I grew up.
But then, stuff happened back home, before I moved back to Emarvia, and I shut those dreams down.
Marriage and family and such. Being a nanny…
” I sigh. I don’t think I’ve ever voiced all these things out loud, and it physically hurts me to even admit to them.
“It gives me the opportunity to be a part of a family, to raise children and teach them and love them and watch them grow, without having to give my heart over to anyone. I didn’t think I could ever have feelings for a man again. ”
“You are still a part of my family, whether you continue to work for us or not.” She gives my hand a squeeze. “The children adore you, and even Dietrich has only good things to say about you.”
I sniffle; tears are coming all too easily lately. “Thank you, Lady Maier.”
She chuckles. “I think you can start calling me Rebecca. You outrank me now.”
“She could soon outrank nearly everyone,” Margaret says.
“That’s all very touching,” Juliette drawls as she sweeps into the room. “But King Aldric has just announced a press conference for tomorrow, and I think it is safe to assume what it may be about. He has invited we five women who remain and all the major press outlets.”
Margaret is turned towards Juliette, so I can’t see her face, but I can feel the dislike radiating from her. “One should never assume, Lady Juliette,” she retorts, taking a sip of her wine for dramatic effect. “And eavesdropping is a terrible habit for a potential future princess.”
“Is it truly eavesdropping if the door is wide open, though?” Her sickly-sweet smile may fool others, but after months of dealing with this woman, I know the venom lying beneath.
“Deepest apologies. I thought perhaps our daily gossip session had begun early, that’s all.”
Juliette saunters from the room, sneering as she closes the door, and I suppress a shiver. Trixie’s no weakness pep talks are working.
“Well, my dearest Aurelia,” Margaret says, pouring the last of the white wine. “It sounds like you have about twenty-four hours to make up your mind. About the inheritance and the prince.”
No pressure.