Chapter 15 #2
The cars pulled up outside. They piled in: Alexandra and Matilda in the back, Julia in the front, Vic with Frank and Hyzenthlay in the second car.
The drive back was quiet. Matilda fell asleep against Alexandra's shoulder ten minutes in, her breathing slow and even, her body surrendering to the exhaustion that five days of crisis had accumulated.
Alexandra held her daughter and watched the morning pass through the window.
The countryside was green and sun-dappled and indifferent to the catastrophe unfolding within it.
Cows grazed in meadows. A farmer drove a tractor along a lane.
A woman walked a dog beside a canal, the animal bounding ahead with the cheerful obliviousness of a creature that didn't know the world was wrong.
Alexandra watched it all and she didn't see any of it.
She saw Florence's sweater in Erin's hands.
She saw the empty bed. She saw the curtains that had been drawn across a window where a child had stood and looked out at a world she couldn't reach.
The castle appeared on the horizon and there was nothing. No relief, no comfort, no sense of homecoming. It was just stone and glass and the flag still flying at half-mast, and Florence was not inside it.
They settled back in. Julia took charge of logistics: arranging meals, coordinating with the security team, managing the stream of calls from Charlotte's office and the media advisors and the Home Secretary's private secretary.
Vic took the children to the kitchen and made them toast with honey and sat with them while they ate, her voice gentle and steady in a way that must have cost her enormously.
Alexandra went upstairs. The corridor was quiet, the stone floor cool beneath her feet, the afternoon light falling through the tall windows in pale rectangles.
She walked to the triplets' bedroom and stood in the doorway and looked at Florence's bed.
The rabbit with its flopped ears and button eyes.
The slippers, toes pointing outward, waiting for feet that had been gone five days.
The books on the nightstand: The Secret Garden on top, the spine cracked at page sixty-seven.
She sat on Florence's bed. The duvet smelled of laundry detergent, not of Florence.
It had been washed since Florence last slept here, five days ago, an entire geological age.
She picked up the stuffed rabbit and held it against her chest and pressed her face into its worn fur and the dam that she'd been holding since the phone call finally broke.
She cried. Silently, because the children were downstairs and the walls were not thick enough, but her body shook with it and the tears ran down her face and into the rabbit's fur and she cried with the wretched, desperate abandon of a mother who was running out of ways to believe that the world would give her child back.
Vic found her there. She must have come upstairs after the children finished eating.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, then crossed the room and sat beside Alexandra on Florence's narrow bed and put her arm around her, and she didn't say anything.
She didn't say it will be okay or they'll find her or you have to stay strong.
She just sat there, solid and warm and present, and held on.
"What if we don't find her?" Alexandra whispered.
"We will."
"But what if we don't? What if she's gone? What if they've taken her somewhere we can't reach and we never—" The words dissolved. She couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't give voice to the shape of the fear because voicing it might make it real.
Vic's arm tightened. "Alex. Listen to me. Erin Kennedy has broken every rule and ignored every protocol to find your daughter. She walked into an armed operation with a bandaged hand and a badge she doesn't carry anymore. She's not going to stop. She is physically incapable of stopping."
"She wouldn't connect with me." The words came out quiet and raw. "On the phone. Her voice. She sounded closed. Like she was somewhere I couldn't reach. And when I asked her to come here she said she couldn't. She didn't say she'd come later. She said she had to go."
"That's Erin in operational mode. You know that."
"I know. But it's never been like this before.
Even after the assassination attempt, even in the hospital, even when she was barely conscious, she reached for me.
She always reaches for me first. And on that call she didn't. She sounded like she was miles away and not just physically.
" Alexandra pressed her face against the rabbit.
"I'm losing Florence and I think I might be losing Erin too.
Not to someone else. To this. To the guilt, to the fury, to whatever she's turning into to survive this.
She's disappearing into the search and I'm afraid she won't come back out. "
Vic was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was different: rougher, more careful, the voice of someone choosing words with unusual precision.
"I've known Erin a long time now. Angry, brilliant, utterly certain that the world is a problem she could solve if she just worked hard enough.
And I've watched her soften over years of loving you.
You changed her, Alex. Not in a way that made her less.
In a way that made her more. She fights harder because she has something to fight for.
And right now she's fighting so hard that she's forgotten to let you in, because letting you in means feeling the grief and the fear and she can't afford that while Florence is still missing. "
"What if our marriage doesn't survive this? Even if Florence comes home, what if the damage is already done?"
"Then you fix it. The way you've fixed everything else. The way you fixed the monarchy after Cecilia nearly destroyed it. The way you fixed Erin after the assassination attempt. The way you fix things, Princess, by refusing to let them stay broken."
Alexandra looked at Vic. Her friend. Erin's friend.
The woman who had been part of their family for so long, who had held newborn triplets and threatened paparazzi and ridden horses beside her many times and was now sitting on a child's bed telling her that her marriage was worth saving.
Vic's eyes were red-rimmed and her jaw was set and there were tears on her cheeks that she hadn't bothered to wipe away, and the raw honesty of her grief was more comforting than any reassurance could have been.
"Thank you," Alexandra said. "For not pretending."
"I'm fucking rubbish at pretending. Ask anyone."
A silence. Then, very quietly, from the doorway: "Mummy Alex?"
Matilda was standing in the hallway in her socks, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her face carrying the solemn, watchful gravity that she'd worn since the morning Florence was taken.
Her eyes moved from Alexandra to Vic and back, and whatever she saw, tears, grief, the rabbit clutched against Alexandra's chest, she absorbed it without flinching.
"Can I sit with you?"
Alexandra opened her arm and Matilda crossed the room and climbed onto the bed and pressed herself between Alexandra and Vic.
She tucked her feet beneath her and leaned her head against Alexandra's shoulder and her small hand found the rabbit and held it, and the three of them sat there on Florence's narrow bed with the rabbit and the silence and the afternoon light coming through the window.
Outside, somewhere in the grounds, a dog barked twice and then stopped.
The castle settled around them with its familiar sounds: pipes ticking, a door closing distantly, the muffled voice of a security officer on a radio.
And they held each other in the particular, wordless communion of people who were waiting for someone to come home.