9. “We Fall Apart” - We As Human
“We Fall Apart” - We As Human
My mother and Beatrice are waiting for me when I get home. One look at their faces tells me everything I need to know.
“Oh my god, Celia! I can’t believe what they’re saying. Is it true?” Bea cries, launching herself at me as I walk through the back door. Lane and Davies remain outside to “secure the perimeter.”
“Let her breathe, Beatrice,” my mother says, freeing my neck from my sister’s overeager grip. “How are you holding up?” She gives the bandage on my forehead a pointed look.
“I’m fine. Just a scratch. Everything else will need more than a sticking plaster.”
She nods, and I can tell she’s already concocting a scheme.
It’s obvious from the way her eyes flick back and forth across the tiled floor, not really seeing anything.
My worst fears have just collided with her highest hopes, and there is nowhere to hide.
The one upside is that if anyone can find a way to spin this so that we come out looking like heroes, it’s my mother.
“We’ll get through this. I’ll make sure of it,” she says.
I move down the hall, hoping for some time to myself to figure out what to do next, but Bea has other plans. She follows me into the library.
“Not now, Bea. Please. I just want to be alone.”
She bites her lower lip, normally covered in gloss but now uncharacteristically bare. I realize she isn’t wearing any makeup at all, something I’ve rarely seen since our mother began allowing it when Bea turned fourteen—a whole year earlier than she did with me. “I need to talk to you,” she says.
“What about?” I pick up the stack of mail on my desk and flip through it.
“It was me.”
“What was you?” Pulling out several items that are destined for the rubbish bin, I set them aside.
“I gave those papers to Fran. She took them to WBC.”
I turn to study my sister. She’s picking at her nails, pink flecks of polish peppering the rug. “What papers?”
“The ones on your desk. The ones you fought with Henry over.” She raises trembling fingers to her eyes and presses them into her sockets. “That’s why this all happened. It’s my fault.”
Comprehension sifts into my foggy head. I scan my desk for the photocopies that I somehow failed to miss all weekend. “You turned the diary over to the press?”
Hands still covering her eyes, she nods.
“What the hell, Beatrice?” My voice crescendos with each syllable.
A trembling sob slips past her lips. “I didn’t know! I had no idea what it was. I came downstairs to get a cup of tea, and I heard you and Henry in the kitchen. I was jealous, so I stayed to listen. I heard you fighting about something, and—”
“You thought you’d take your jealousy out on me?”
“I wasn’t really thinking.”
“You don’t say.”
“I knew that Henry wanted to come forward with whatever was in those papers and you didn’t. I wanted to help him out.”
“You betrayed your sister for a fling?”
“No!” She clasps her hands together as though in prayer. She’ll need a prayer before I’m through with her. “I just . . . lost myself for a moment. I thought I could help Henry out, and . . .” Her shoulders droop as her words trail away.
“And you thought he’d be so grateful to you for it. Well, the joke’s on you, because you made as big of a mess for him as you did for me. Even if I had let him come forward with this, he wouldn’t have gone to the bloody WBC.”
“I know that now. I—I’m sorry for everything. Please say you forgive me. I’ll do anything.”
Before I can answer, my phone rings. It’s Beck. “I need to take this, but we are not done here.” I push past Bea, accepting the call on my way out of the room.
“I heard about everything that happened. Are you okay?” he says.
“I’m fine. Just a little shook up.”
“I’m outside your house, but two angry-looking men won’t let me inside.”
“You’re here?” I walk to the front door and pull it open. Beck is standing several yards away, apparently as close as Davies and Lane will allow him. “He’s my fiancé,” I tell them.
They step aside, and Beck brushes past them and into the house. Once the door is closed, he lowers his lips to mine. His kiss is warm and reassuring. He’s exactly who I needed to see.
“I can’t believe this madness. Are you sure you’re okay?” he says.
I entwine our fingers and lead him to the back of the house. “Let’s go for a walk. I feel like I might explode in here.” Maybe I’ll get lucky and the shrapnel will puncture one of Bea’s lungs.
We stroll through the garden, which is donning its summer finery in a seductive dance. The sweet, heavy fragrance of warm flowers hangs in the air.
“Do you have an enemy out to tarnish your name?” Beck says. “Who would concoct a story like this? And worse yet, who would believe it?”
I hear my blood roaring the way it does when you hold a shell to your ear. Of course it’s all rot. I never believed it myself. I force a chuckle. “A bunch of idiots, I suppose.”
There is silence for a few minutes as we wind our way through the hedgerows. When he finally speaks, his voice is hushed. “It is just a story, isn’t it?”
“God, I hope so.” It comes out in a whoosh. My heart is balancing on the edge of a precipice, and the slightest nudge will send it toppling over.
“Have you spoken with anyone from the Crown yet?”
I nod. “Henry told me there was an emergency meeting scheduled with the prime minister, but that’s all I’ve heard.”
“They won’t hesitate to throw you under the bus to save their own skin,” Beck says.
He’s probably right. Isn’t that what I’ve suspected all along? “I’m already under the bus. A few more hits won’t matter much.”
“We’ll take legal action if we need to. Those kinds of fabrications could be considered libel.”
“Even if there’s truth to them?”
He stops, which pulls me to a halt as well. “What are you talking about?” The warmth has leached out of his voice.
“There is a diary,” I say. “Maisie was the one who read it first.”
“You knew about this?”
“Only recently.”
“How long, Celia?”
“It’s not important. It—”
“How long?”
Damn it. I should have told him. “Since Friday night.”
Beck looks at me incredulously. “You knew the entire weekend and didn’t say a word? What was your plan?” Frustration rolls off him. The heat of it mixes with the sunshine to create a stifling cocktail. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
What can I say that won’t sound foolish and offensive? Sorry, I didn’t think it mattered? I assumed you wouldn’t care if I made this decision without telling you? It never crossed my mind to ask your opinion? In the end, I settle for: “I was hoping no one would ever find out.”
“For god’s sake, Celia. There’s a chance you should be our queen, and you thought you’d keep it to yourself?”
“When you put it like that, it sounds pretty stupid,” I mutter.
He barrels on. “What I can’t reconcile is the fact that you weren’t going to tell me about this. We’re getting married. I imagine this is the kind of thing couples share with each other.”
“Can’t imagine very many people having this conversation.”
His nostrils flare. “You know what I mean.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have told you.” I grab both his hands in mine. “I was hoping if I stuffed it away, I could pretend didn’t know anything.”
Beck pulls me into his arms, his embrace a solid wall of security. “I only wish you’d allowed me to help you through it.”
“You’re here now,” I say against his suit jacket.
“And I’m not going anywhere, okay? We’re in this together.”
I squeeze him hard and pray he’s right, even as part of me wonders how quickly he’ll regret those words.
By evening, my WhatsApp is blowing up. My uni flatmates have watched the news and are struggling to reconcile the girl they used to dig out of the history stacks with the one whose face is currently splashed across all major news outlets—a diva who’s trying to steal the crown.
Despite my mother’s best attempts, I attended the University of Wesbourne rather than going abroad to Yale or Oxford. My argument was that she’d raised me according to her standards for the first eighteen years. The rest were mine to do with as I pleased.
My memories of uni are mostly of the sprawling modern campus, the giant vat of peanut M&Ms that was always on the buffet, and a group of girlfriends who were the perfect antidote to my slight obsession with my studies.
They dragged me to soccer matches, where we’d sit on the bleachers in our hoodies and sip spiked hot cocoa and flirt with cute boys.
Those nights were the most carefree of my adulthood, but they weren’t really me.
Friendships have never come easily for me.
When you show people your vulnerable side, you give them the opportunity to hurt you.
It’s much easier to keep your distance, even if it means not having close friends you can turn to when your world blows up because you might be the rightful monarch of your country and that country now hates you.
I know they get together without me. I can’t blame them.
I’m a bore because I never have more than one drink, and I criticize everything around me.
They always invited me out during the year following graduation, but the club scene has never appealed to me.
And between the various charities I joined, my relationship with Beck, and eventually my position as the director of the Historical Society, I more often than not had an excuse for not going.
Eventually the invitations stopped coming, and the chat thread that includes me only lights up when someone has a birthday or starts dating someone new.
Or when someone makes breaking news nationwide.
Ally: Oh my GAWD, Celia. Is it true?
That depends on what you’ve heard.
Jasmine: Of course it’s not true. You can’t believe anything on the news these days.
Jasmine, ever the conspiracy theorist.
Rachel: What are you planning to do, Cece?
I hate that bloody nickname.
Leslie: How could you not tell us? We’re your best friends!
That’s debatable. Do best friends go for months without speaking?
Ally: Let’s do a girls’ night! It’s been AGES since we’ve hung. I heard Fire on 79 is FANTASTIC.