Lady Isabeau

Nobody tells Lady Isabeau de Montclair to leave.

Nobody, it turns out, can. Matthias tries. He says "My lady, this is a private…" and she lifts one perfectly shaped eyebrow, and he closes his mouth and finds something urgent to read on his tablet.

Alexander's hand leaves your waist. He doesn't step away, though. He shifts, just slightly, so that his shoulder is between you and the door.

"Isabeau," he says. "You weren't expected."

"I'm never expected. I just arrive." Her voice is low and cool, with the faint French lilt of the old Aubervalois nobility. "I'd like tea with your fiancée, Alexander. Since apparently I'm being replaced by her, I think I've earned that."

He looks at you. Not at her. At you.

It's a question. Both parties.

"Tea's fine," you say. "I like tea."

Isabeau smiles. It's beautiful and it doesn't reach her eyes at all.

They serve it in a glass room full of orange trees. Isabeau pours, because of course she does, with wrists like a ballet dancer. Up close she's even more unreal: skin like porcelain, gray eyes rimmed in darker gray, a tiny diamond in each ear. She doesn't wear a ring. You've never been so aware of the one on your own hand.

Nadia stands by the door, hands clasped behind her back, looking at nothing.

"How long have you known him?" Isabeau asks.

"Long enough."

"Liar." She says it pleasantly. "You met him on Tuesday. He was running from my father's photographers."

You put your cup down. "Your father's?"

"Who do you think tipped off the press that the Crown Prince was walking alone in the old town?" Isabeau sips her tea. "Father wanted pictures of him looking haggard. 'The lonely prince, in need of a wife.' Instead he got you." A pause. "He was not pleased."

You don't know what to say to that, so you don't say anything. Isabeau watches you over the rim of her cup.

"I'm not your enemy, Ava," she says finally. "I want you to understand that. I don't want him. I've never wanted him. He's beautiful and he's decent and he looks at me like I'm a weather report." Something flickers in her face, gone too fast to name. "But my father doesn't lose. He's never lost. Not a contract, not a vote, not a war of words. And he has decided that I will be queen."

"So what happens to me?"

Isabeau sets her cup down. Precisely. Silently.

"He'll try to buy you first," she says. "If that doesn't work, he'll try to break you. And if that doesn't work…" She tilts her head. "I honestly don't know. Nobody's ever gotten that far."

The orange trees rustle in the heat. Your mouth is very dry.

"Why are you warning me?"

Isabeau doesn't answer. She glances, for one half second, toward the door, toward Nadia, standing there like a statue.

And Nadia, who has looked at nothing for twenty minutes, looks back.

It's barely anything. A breath. A flicker. Then Isabeau is looking at you again, and her face is ice, and Nadia is staring at the far wall like the far wall owes her money.

But you saw it.

You run a café. You've watched a thousand people across a thousand tables. You know what it looks like when someone is pretending very hard not to look at someone else.

"More tea?" says Isabeau.

When you come out of the orangery, Alexander is waiting in the corridor, leaning on the wall with his arms folded like he's been there a while.

"Well?" he asks quietly.

"She says she doesn't want you."

"I know." The corner of his mouth lifts. "She's told me. Repeatedly. With diagrams."

"She says her father doesn't lose."

The smile goes away.

Behind you, Isabeau steps out of the orangery, pulling on a pair of gray leather gloves.

"Alexander," she says. "A word. Alone."

He hesitates. He looks at you. You shrug, go, and he follows Isabeau down the long portrait gallery, the two of them walking side by side under the painted eyes of three centuries of kings. Up close, they'd look like a perfume ad. Tall and gold and silver and devastating. The kind of couple that gets put on commemorative plates.

You watch them go and tell yourself the feeling in your stomach is hunger.

They talk for ten minutes at the far end of the gallery, too far away to hear. Isabeau's hands move as she speaks. Alexander stands very still. At one point he shakes his head, short and hard, and says something that makes Isabeau go quiet.

Somewhere down the corridor, a door clicks shut. You glance toward the sound, but there's nobody there.

When he comes back, his face is closed like a book.

"Everything okay?" you ask.

"Fine," he says. "She wanted to know whether I'm serious about you."

"And are you?"

He looks down at you, and for a second the closed book cracks open.

"Matthias is waiting," he says. "We have a photocall."

The palace announces it at four p.m.

Their Majesties are delighted to announce the engagement of His Royal Highness the Crown Prince Alexander to Ava, proprietor of Café Hélène, Castelmere.

That's it. Two lines. It breaks the internet anyway.

At four-thirty, you're standing in the rose garden in a borrowed blue dress Leontine swore "does things for you," the sapphire on your hand, while forty photographers shout from behind a rope.

"Sir! Sir! Over here!"

"Ava! Look this way! Show us the ring!"

You've never been so terrified in your life. Your smile feels pinned on. Your knees are doing something independent.

Then Alexander steps up beside you, and the shouting stops.

You actually hear it stop. Forty photographers, and for one second, nobody says anything at all. They just look at him.

He's in a navy suit with the crest of the Royal Navy on a small pin at his lapel. The late sun is behind him, turning his hair to gold and throwing his face into sharp, perfect relief. He looks like something carved and then brought to life by somebody who'd been in love with the sculptor's model. Even the cameras seem to hesitate.

Then a hundred shutters go off at once.

He doesn't look at them. He looks at you.

"Breathe," he murmurs. "They can smell fear. Like geese."

You snort. You can't help it. And he smiles, and a woman at the front of the press pen literally says "oh" out loud, and every camera catches it.

"Kiss on the hand?" he asks, very low. Asking.

"Yes."

He lifts your hand and kisses the back of it, just above the sapphire, his eyes on yours the whole time. It's polite. It's perfect. It's in the contract.

Your whole arm goes hot.

The pictures are everywhere by six. THE PRINCE AND THE CAFÉ GIRL. HE SMILED! The Courier runs one of his face as he looks at you, enormous, front page, no headline at all. It doesn't need one.

You're in the east wing, shoes off, staring at it on your phone, when there's a knock.

A footman in white gloves. Very young, very nervous.

"Excuse me, miss," he says. "His Majesty the King requests your presence in his study."

You look past him for Alexander. For Matthias. For anyone.

"He asked that you come alone," says the footman.