29. “The Lucky One” - Taylor Swift
“The Lucky One” - Taylor Swift
Imay have been overambitious in what I agreed to when I was brainstorming ways to get the press’s attention on us and off of Bea. I blame the sex hormones. With Henry back home and neither of us under the illusion that we are trying for a baby, it’s like our honeymoon all over again.
He’s been keeping me fully distracted with the incredible things he can do with his hands, which somehow leads to me losing all common sense and arranging a private meeting with Elizabeth Gable. Regret plagues me as I wait for her to appear in the Audience Room.
I’m wearing a green suit and four-inch heels. When I put it on this morning, it made me feel powerful and confident, but the second Elizabeth walks into the room, I know it was the wrong choice.
She’s even more stunning than I remember and has chosen the perfect outfit for the occasion, as always. As far as I know, she doesn’t have a stylist and hairdresser to aid her in such choices, and she still manages to look like Blake Lively.
She’s wearing a floral dress that hits a few inches above her knees, the flirty hemline floating through the air as she walks. She’s thrown a soft pink cardigan on top. The whole thing screams “romantic stroll through the farmer’s market, and also open to stealing husbands that aren’t nailed down!”
At least Henry won’t be joining us this time.
She crosses her legs on the sofa opposite me and softly bounces her foot. I wonder if it’s a nervous tic.
“I wanted to speak to you about Axel,” I begin.
Her foot stops moving. “Is everything okay?”
Other than you taking a wrecking ball to my life? “Absolutely. He’s a great kid.”
She beams, and I suppose she does deserve some credit for shaping him this way. “Thank you. He’s my entire world.”
I brush my hands across the fabric of my trousers. “Given the circumstances, we would like to ensure that he has a bright future. Opportunities, you know.”
Her eyes narrow like a cat’s. “Are you implying he doesn’t already have those things?” It’s the first time I’ve heard anything other than pure maple syrup in her tone.
“Of course not,” I say. “We just want to do what we can to assist.”
“Will Henry be joining us?” Elizabeth looks around the room as if he might pop out from behind the Chinese silk screen.
I resist the smirk that is begging to lift the side of my mouth.
“He wanted to be here, but unfortunately, he had some important things to sort out.” In reality, he doesn’t even know I’m meeting with her.
I’m not planning to keep it a secret; I just haven’t had a chance to tell him yet.
Every time we’re together, our mouths tend to be busy with other things.
“I thought it would give us the chance to talk, woman to woman.”
If she’s intimidated by this, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she crosses her hands over her knee and smiles. “Great idea.”
“How do you feel about boarding school?” I say. “Eton is the classic choice, of course, but—”
“I don’t think so.”
I smooth out the list of schools in my lap. “Well, there are plenty of other options. Henry went to—”
She shakes her head. “Axel belongs with me.”
“Of course he does. Preparatory school is still years away, but now is the time to make these kinds of plans. Waitlists tend to fill up, after all.”
“Forgive me, Your Majesty, but I don’t want my son shipped off to another country for years. He’s all I have.”
I blink at her. Most people would be thrilled to have their child’s funding to the most elite schools in the world covered. “What do you plan to do instead?”
“He can go to school right here in Wesbourne. I went to Hawthorne Prep myself, and while it’s not Eton, I don’t have any gaps in my education.”
“S-sure,” I stammer. “But he’s the son of the prince consort. There are certain expectations—”
“I don’t care about any of that.” She tilts her chin upward. Her voice is firm.
I search her face, trying to solve the puzzle of what she’s after. “Then what do you care about?”
“My son.”
“Of course,” I say. “But why did you come barging into our lives like this if you didn’t expect things to change?”
“I told you before, I don’t need or want your money. I only want Axel to have a father.”
I notice she doesn’t say his father. “Couldn’t you marry someone and give him a normal family? It won’t be easy to grow up in the public eye.”
A light laugh bubbles out of her. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the available men out there these days, but trust me when I tell you, it’s not a pretty sight.”
There’s something more here, but I can’t put my finger on it. “But why Henry? You’ve disrupted the entire nation over this, with no foreseeable benefit to your son.”
“Family is everything,” she says softly.
I think of my own family, and how wrecked we became the minute my dad was diagnosed with the brain tumor that stole him from us. “Yeah, it is.”
Something else occurs to me. “You should know that the Sutherland family is . . .” I wrestle for the right words. “Well, they aren’t the healthiest family in the world, at least not emotionally.”
Elizabeth laughs again. “Find me the one that is.”
“I don’t mean in the way that all families have their quirks and struggles,” I say. “I mean in some pretty serious ways. You should be aware of that before you expose your son to things that could potentially mess up the rest of his life.”
This is something I’ve been working through. Bringing a child into the world only for them to be hurt isn’t right. But at the same time, I have to trust that Henry is a different person than his father. He’s far from perfect, but he has traits William could only ever dream about.
“I gave this a lot of thought before I sent that letter.” Her foot bounces again. “I know that the situation is far from ideal, but I think the benefits outweigh all of that.”
For who? I want to ask. But these thoughts of William have reminded me of something else, something that’s been niggling at the back of my mind for days. Something I’ve been too distracted to pay much heed to until now.
“Why did you visit William in prison?” I blurt out.
Her foot stops midbounce, and she slowly lowers it to the floor. “How do you know about that?” Her eyes drop to the floral print of her dress.
“I don’t think that’s the issue here.”
“Did you follow me?”
I bark out a laugh. “As if I don’t have better things to do than trail you around the country.” I cross my own legs and drape my wrists over them. It’s about time I was back in charge of this conversation. “So what was it? You thought you’d inform him that he has a grandson?”
She keeps her gaze on her lap as a pink tinge colors her face. “No.”
“What then? Were you asking him for advice on raising boys? Because trust me, he is the last person you want to ask.”
“Of course not.” The words come out in a whisper.
“Then tell me why someone like you”—I give her outfit a meaningful look—“would visit a federal prison to chat with a convicted felon.”
Elizabeth is twisting her hands together, and for a minute, I don’t think she’s going to answer me. But she lifts her gaze to mine and says in a quavering voice, “Because I had to.”
“You had to?” I say. “Did he summon you or something?”
She diverts her gaze, her jaw twitching as she struggles to hold back tears. “I doubt he even remembered me.”
“Remembered you? Were the two of you acquainted?”
She gives her head a tiny shake. “Not exactly.”
“Then how did you expect him to remember you?”
She loses her grip on her emotions, and a single sob slips out.
“You don’t understand. I needed closure.
Or I thought I did. But he was so nasty about it all—” She runs a finger under each eye to push out the tears caught there.
“I thought I was ready to handle it, but after seeing him, I realized I wasn’t. ”
My forehead creases. “I’m not following. Closure from what?”
It takes a long time for her to look up at me, and when she does, her eyes are wet. “He raped me.”
Every line on my face melts away, and my mouth falls open. “He what?”
“It was years ago,” she says. “Before you became queen. I came to the palace for one of Henry’s parties.”
I’ve heard about these parties, although I never received an invitation to one myself.
Infamous for their raucous debauchery, all manner of drugs, high-end alcohol on tap, women in nothing but their underwear, shared and swapped partners, games of truth or dare that always got out of hand.
I don’t know how many of the rumors are true, but for my own sanity, I’d rather not find out.
“I left to find the restroom,” she continues, taking a deep breath. “I got turned around in one of the hallways. He ran into me, and I was so speechless to be face-to-face with the king that when he told me to follow him, I did it without thinking.”
A skeletal hand grips my heart and squeezes tightly. I wish I’d never asked about her visit to William, because I don’t want to hear the rest of this story.
“He took me into a dark room, and it wasn’t until he locked the door that I got scared.
I was drunk and a little high, but hearing that lock click into place sobered me up pretty quickly.
I told him no, but he didn’t listen, just forced me onto the sofa, and—” She squeezes her eyes shut as if trying to erase the memory.
“I’m sorry,” she says after a long exhale. “My therapist thought I was ready to face my demons, but clearly I wasn’t.”
I blink several times. “Your therapist encouraged you to see your rapist?”
Her eyes flicker to me, then back down to her lap, where she fiddles with the lace hem of her dress. “She didn’t know that’s what I was planning to do. We were trying to find closure. I was the one who thought it might help.”
“I am so sorry.” I reach across and place my hand on top of hers. “No one should have to endure something like that.” Not even you.
Her throat bobs as she swallows several times in a row. “There’s more,” she says softly. Her breath catches. “William is Axel’s father.”
The room shifts around me, and I brace my palms against the sofa to keep from shifting with it. I heard what she said, but I can’t make sense of it. She’s clearly waiting for me to speak, but I don’t have a clue how to respond.
“I know this must come as a shock,” she says.
“A shock?” I let out a cackle. It sounds awful, but it feels cathartic. “Please tell me you’re joking.” My mind whirls. After everything that’s happened, she’s admitting it’s all been a lie?
“I wouldn’t joke about something like this,” she says.
“How can you possibly know he’s Axel’s father?”
Her face flushes an even deeper pink. “I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time.”
“You just said you were at one of Henry’s parties. I’ve heard enough stories—”
“It wasn’t anyone there, trust me. Those parties had a worse reputation than they deserved.”
I shake my head, hoping it will rearrange the pieces of this whole conversation into an order that makes some semblance of sense. “No. This can’t be right. We did DNA testing. It said Henry is the father.”
“All I know is that Henry and I had sex several months before that. The timing wouldn’t have been right.”
My brain trips over her blatant announcement that she slept with my husband. That is not something I want to dwell on. “Maybe you got the timing wrong?” I don’t know why I’m fighting her on this when she’s giving me exactly what I’ve been wanting all along: proof that she’s lying.
“I didn’t,” she says.
“Then why did the DNA spit out a 97 percent chance of paternity?”
She takes a deep breath and smooths her dress over her legs.
“I did a lot of research on this to make sure it would work. These companies only test small amounts of data due to time and cost constraints. A child receives one copy of their genes from each parent. Because Henry and William share much of the same DNA as father and son, Axel received a lot of the same DNA from William that Henry did, making Henry’s test positive.
If it had been tested alongside William’s DNA, it would have been obvious who the real father was. ”
I let this sink in for a few moments. “Then why did you concoct this ridiculous story? If you’re not after money, what is it you want? Why go to these lengths?”
“I didn’t lie about that part. I want Axel to have a father. I made some bad decisions in the past, but becoming a mother changed me. I want to be someone he can look up to and be proud of.” She wipes away her tears, leaving a tiny streak of mascara beneath each eye.
“Surely there are plenty of men who would be thrilled to be a part of yours and Axel’s life. Why not one of them? Why Henry?”
She turns pink. “Because he’s . . . Henry.” The dreamy softness in her voice causes my stomach to turn over as the realization smacks me between the eyes.
“Oh my god. You’re in love with him,” I say.
Her expression grows panicked. “I would never do anything, I promise.”
I don’t know if I believe her, but it doesn’t matter, because I believe Henry, and he has assured me over and over of his faithfulness. “Why are you telling me this? I could ruin your entire plan. All I need to do is tell him the truth.”
She stares at me with an intense gaze that is a little unnerving. Beneath that soft, feminine exterior, this woman has a backbone of steel. “I’m trusting that you love your husband too much to do that.”