Chapter Thirty 31 December 2023
CHAPTER THIRTY
I woke up as the plane glided over Boomer Bay, sparkling in the summer sun, and then landed among the pine forests that surrounded the airport.
It was a perfect Hobart day. Despite the heat, I walked across the tarmac in my hoodie, breathing in the pure Southern Ocean air.
I knew I was home when I watched, bleary-eyed, as a fibreglass seal statue glided past on the baggage carousel.
Children with Australian accents dodged me as they ran around my feet.
Sniffer dogs inspected my backpack for illicit apples.
I felt Jack’s proximity like a cosmic tug.
He was down the road, across a few paddocks, and behind the gates of the Jennings vineyard.
But I knew I couldn’t think about that. I pulled my hood forward so it nearly covered my eyes.
No one had recognised me yet, not in the hotel where I spent twelve hours with Dee, and not on the two subsequent flights to get home.
But Hobart was a small town, where it was common to run into old friends at the airport, so I kept my eyes on the floor.
As soon as I turned my phone back on, it rang.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
“Last leg okay?”
“Yep, all fine.” I peered at the hole in the wall where bags were starting to emerge. “Any more updates?”
“Well,” Mary said, sounding pleased, “Dee called Davide Rossi, and he agreed to give her an interview.”
My stomach lurched, and I looked at the people around me. Their eyes remained on the carousel as they waited for their bags.
“But Dee won’t pay him,” I said. “She’s not that kind of journalist—she works for a paper of record, not a tabloid.”
“I know. She was as surprised as you are.”
A couple jostled to the front so they could pull a suitcase from the conveyor belt. Their little girl peered up at me curiously, and I turned, wandering further down the carousel where I would be away from the crowd.
“I don’t understand why he’d do it.”
“She gave him a call, expecting he would just hang up. But she said he agreed to an interview on the spot. He wasn’t looking for payment, he just wanted to be truthful about what happened,” Mary said.
“According to Dee, he said he’d never seen a mother and daughter who loved each other more. He called you ‘bellezza and carina.’”
I let out a shaky breath and closed my eyes against the pain at the core of me. It was difficult to imagine that anyone could forgive me. But maybe James was right. Maybe I needed to forgive myself first.
“What happens now?” I asked Mary.
My bag finally appeared, and I struggled to drag it to my feet.
“Annabelle’s and Amira’s interviews are done, so Rossi is the last piece of the puzzle,” she said. “The paper will have to talk to their legal team and then give Richard adequate time to respond, so I imagine the story will be out in about a week.”
I heard her hesitate.
“The palace will come after you hard. You know that, right? Their only option will be to try to discredit you.”
“I know.”
It felt like I had slowly edged the pin from my old life.
Now I was watching the spring-loaded striker smashing against the fuse, lighting a tiny unstoppable spark.
In a week’s time, I would be stripped of my titles by parliament.
But as Richard stepped over me, I was ready for him—I would be the explosive rolled at just the right moment, at just the right angle, detonating beneath his foot.
Soon everyone would know that he had tried to blackmail me.
They would know that Papa and Annabelle spent years living in fear of Richard.
And while Amira had spoken in support of Annabelle and me, she had shared no secrets of her own.
The truth of Louis and Kris’s relationship wasn’t our story to tell.
Maybe one day everyone would know how happy they were—after we were all gone.
“Why are you doing this?” Dee had asked me in the hotel room, her pen poised over a scribble-filled notepad. “Are you trying to topple the monarchy?”
I was silent for a while, unsure of the answer.
I had once believed I could change things from the inside.
But if Granny was right, the crown had already decided whose head it was destined to land upon.
There was a reason it briefly floated towards me—if only so I could nudge it away from Richard and towards Demelza.
“I’m doing this because I can’t live with the lies anymore,” I said to Dee. “My only option is to be honest about everything I’ve done and everything my uncle has done. The people of Britain and the Commonwealth deserve the truth. What happens next is up to them.”
Outside the airport, the heat was dry and stifling. I pulled off the hoodie I’d used to hide my face.
“Do you think this is going to work?” I asked Mary.
“Do I think three women can take on a powerful institution and force it to change? Probably not. But what’s the alternative? Staying silent forever?”
I walked towards the pick-up lane. Ahead of me, I could see James leaning against the back of his LandCruiser with his hands in his pockets.
“I should go, my ride’s here,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll call with updates when I have them,” she said. “Oh, and happy new year. For tomorrow.”
I wheeled my bag up to James’s car and we stood staring at each other, neither of us able to smile.
I was struck by how much he looked like Mum, though his hair was starting to go silver around his temples, the grooves in his face more pronounced.
It was hard not to look at him and see her face if she had been allowed to age.
“Oh, dearest,” he said kindly, “you look like hell.”
As he wrapped his arms around me, the tears finally came.
I wept silently against his chest. I cried for my family and the mess I had made of my life.
I cried for our twins who were lost to us.
In all the years I had known him, James had never held me before, but he rubbed my back awkwardly and kissed the top of my head.
“It’s alright. You’re home now.”
We drove out of the airport and I looked from the window at the dry hills shimmering under a blue sky.
Everything was the same as it always was—parched and spare and beautiful—and I could almost believe my lost year had never really happened.
London felt very far away. Soon the real world would encroach again, but for now I was home, and no one knew where to find me.
“When do you start back at the hospital?” James asked as we turned onto the road towards Richmond.
The route would take us past the vineyard, and I braced myself for the sight of it.
“In two weeks,” I said.
“Do you think you’ll be ready for that?”
I would be a third-year resident while all my colleagues had already moved onto their specialties.
Every patient would know exactly who I was and what I had done.
My face would be in their gossip magazines, and they would whisper about me behind their hands.
I would be followed by photographers for months until the world moved on to the next scandal.
“I need to get back to my life,” I said, and it was true.
I could see the bright-red gates of the Jennings vineyard ahead of us, the neat rows of the pinot vines already fluttering by my window. I was wondering whether I should avert my eyes when I realised James was pulling the car over.
“What are we doing?” I asked, alarmed.
He turned the engine off and looked at me levelly. “I think we should go in.”
My eyes blurred with hot tears. Even in the midst of my distress, I wondered if I was ever going to get hold of myself again. I had once been a girl who hadn’t cried in years, who couldn’t force the tears to come even when I needed them to. Now I couldn’t seem to stop.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Please, you don’t understand—”
“Lexi,” James said, “Jack knows everything. Amira called him a few weeks ago and told him what was happening. She told him what Richard was doing to you. She told him about the boat. She told him you’ve been miserable ever since he left Scotland.”
When I turned to look at him, he brushed a tear off my cheek.
“Then she had to call me because it was all she could do to stop him getting on a plane to London to go rescue you himself. I had to drive down here in the middle of the night and promise him I would get you home safe.”
I hid my face in my palms and wept. Distantly, I felt James’s hand on my back again.
“I won’t make you go in,” he said. “But he knows I’m picking you up today and he wants to see you.”
“Amira told him?” I managed.
James nodded. “All of it. Now, what do you want to do? Should we keep driving? Or do you want to go tell this man how you feel?”
We drove through the gates and up the long gravel path, through the thick vines that would soon be ready to harvest, and past the old house.
Among the poplars, I could just glimpse our cottage.
It was New Year’s Eve, so Paula would be camping down on the peninsula.
Finn, I knew, was on shift at the hospital.
We rumbled through the cluster of sheds and out towards the back field where Jack had once told me he planned to experiment with a dark-skinned terret noir.
Between two young budding vines, he stood with his back to us. But when he heard the car, he turned, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun. There he was, all of him exactly the same, still too wonderful to contemplate.
James wrenched up the handbrake and looked at me.
“Go on,” he said. “It’ll be alright.”