Spare Me

Chapter 31

THREE MONTHS LATER

“ S orry, sir,” Graham said, looking at Alex ruefully in the rearview mirror of the Range Rover. “I’m afraid this is really the only route back to the palace.”

“Graham, you don’t have to apologize for traffic,” Alex said, glancing through the heavily tinted windows at the gridlock surrounding them. “You’re good, but even you aren’t that good.”

“Right you are, sir,” Graham said merrily, returning his focus to the road as they crept slowly forward.

Alex sighed. It had been almost four months since Maddy had walked out of his apartment for the last time, and he still thought about her every day. He’d had to force himself not to text her, not to ask when she was leaving. He knew by now she had to be gone, back in America, starting her new life. But he wondered. Wondered where she was living, whether her classes had started, if she’d made friends in DC, whether her new apartment was any less sparsely decorated than the rooms she’d inhabited at Winfield House.

He wondered at least three times weekly if he’d made a huge mistake not asking if he could come with her. He’d thought about calling her so many times, about begging her to take him back, to take him with her. But the knowledge that his family needed him, that he was being useful for once in his entire life, kept him from reaching out. Not to mention that Maddy hadn’t asked him to come. And she had to have had a reason. He knew she’d felt very responsible for making the decision on her own, considering her own needs and priorities without bringing her feelings for him into it. And even if it stung a little, he also respected the hell out of her for it. She’d been a dutiful daughter and then wife for so many years that he glowed with pride when he thought about her confidently going after what she wanted. Making the best choice for herself and only herself. He’d convinced her to let him intrude into the London chapter of her burgeoning independence, but he’d be damned if he became the third man in her life whose public persona pushed her dreams into the background.

They finally arrived at Buckingham Palace an hour later, and Alex let himself in the side door, heading to the sitting room where his mother had taken to spending most of her time. As he let himself in, he narrowly avoided being tripped by Anne of Cleves, who was sinuously winding herself around his ankles the second he walked through the door. “Goddamned cat,” he muttered under his breath as he walked toward the couch.

The queen looked up from her iPad as he crossed the room toward her. “Hi, Mum,” he said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

“Hello, darling,” she said, smiling warmly up at him. She looked normal now. Not ashen and frail the way she had after her surgery. It had been hard to be reminded of his mother’s fallibility when she’d had the heart attack, but Alex was reassured by the way that she had bounced back. Almost four and a half months after the surgery, you almost couldn’t tell that anything had been wrong. She still tired easily and she wouldn’t be going back to her private Pilates sessions anytime soon, but the doctors were almost ready to clear her to return to a modified version of royal duties.

After convalescing at Windsor for a month, she and the king had returned to London, and the king had started easing back into work. At first he refused to leave central London, wanting to be close enough to rush back to his wife’s side at a moment’s notice. But as her strength returned, he had gradually started venturing further afield with the promise that at least one of his sons would be nearby. He had finally returned to more or less a normal schedule. Currently, Alex was pretty sure his father was in Switzerland at some kind of international economic summit. In order to convince him to go, he and Ben had had to promise that they would look in on their mother every day, and so one of them would stop by in the afternoon before an evening outing or after their last appearance of the day each day. It was an odd callback to the way their parents had carved out time to spend with the boys in their youth.

Alex was surprised to hear the door open again behind him, followed by both a high-pitched shriek and a frantic yowl as Ben entered and promptly stepped on Anne of Cleves.

“What are you doing here, mate? I thought tonight was my night?” Alex asked, as Ben regained his footing, muttering curses, and made his way over to kiss the Queen’s cheek affectionately.

Offering Alex a fist bump as he sat down in an armchair across from the sofa, Ben replied, “What, I can’t just stop by to see my mum and my brother?”

“I mean, of course you can ,” Alex sputtered.

“What do you mean it’s your night?” their mother demanded in mock outrage. She knew that her sons were taking turns coming to check on her in her husband’s absence. Alex and Ben knew that their mother knew. And yet the three of them continued operating under the thin fiction that the brothers were just casually dropping by to say hello each evening.

“How was the rugby match?” Queen Sarah asked, sliding over to make room for Alex to sit next to her as she put her iPad on the end table.

“Good,” Alex said. “Cute kids. I think our side won.” He had gone through the motions of the appearance, a charity game benefitting a youth rugby club in an impoverished area of London, shaking hands and cheering at the appropriate time when the brawny men used their shapely knees to bludgeon each other.

“You think?” his mother asked incredulously. “It was a rout!”

“Was it?” he asked distractedly.

“Alex,” she said, putting a hand on his knee.

“Yeah, Mum?”

She didn’t say anything, and finally he looked up at her from where he’d been picking at a loose thread on the brocade of the sofa. She was looking at him intently. In her eyes he saw concern and something that he couldn’t pinpoint. It seemed eerily like conviction or knowledge. Like she knew something he didn’t. He expected her to chide him for not paying close enough attention to the game. Instead she simply asked, “Are you happy?”

He blinked at her. “What do you mean, am I happy?”

“I mean: Are. You. Happy? You’ve been working your tail off all summer, but is it bringing you joy?” His mother had taken to reading popular titles during her convalescence. Clearly Marie Kondo had made the list.

“I’m…” Alex searched for words. “I think staying busy is good for me. And I thought I was being useful.”

Ben jumped in. “Alex, you’ve been enormously useful. Not only am I just happy you’re here because I missed you when you were away, but I can’t imagine what we would have done without you here to pitch in this summer. But we can also do this without you. If this isn’t what you’re meant to be doing, we don’t want you to feel like you have to be doing it.”

It was at that moment that Alex realized he was in the middle of an intervention. “I mean, at the risk of overinflating my importance, I thought I was needed here.” He tried—and definitely failed—to keep the defensiveness out of his voice.

“You were. You are . I always need my boys near me,” his mother said, seeming to realize that he’d been slightly offended by the implication. “But the doctors are going to let me start going back to work next week. And Hannah is really stepping up. People love it when she turns up at events with your brother. I think she’s ready to start going out on her own soon.”

“She absolutely is,” Ben added. “Honestly, I think most of the time the crowds are more interested in seeing her than they are to see me.”

“Ah, I see,” Alex said. A part of him had thought that now that he’d stepped up and shown that he could pull his weight in the family that there might be a permanent place for him. That he might have finally found some kind of purpose to his life. The thought had been the only thing really keeping him going since Maddy had left him. He’d thrown himself into work, taking on as many appearances as the Private Secretary’s office would allow him to take, with the excuse that his father needed to spend as much time with the queen as possible and his brother and sister-in-law were still newlyweds who’d had to cut their honeymoon short and deserved to take it easy. But this conversation was making it seem like maybe that wasn’t the case at all and that he’d been making a nuisance of himself.

“No, Alex,” his mother said, firmly. “You’re misunderstanding us. We all see how much you’ve stepped up. You’ve done an incredible job. You’re a natural at this, and I feel badly that we didn’t see it sooner. We should have noticed that you didn’t need us to protect you quite as much as we had been.” Alex shifted, slightly uncomfortable with the praise, even as much as he needed to hear it. “But,” she went on, “it’s also clear that you’re throwing yourself into work to compensate for the fact that you’re miserable since you and Maddy broke up.”

“I also can’t leave Eric in the lurch,” Alex retorted, pointedly ignoring the last part of his mother’s statement. “The reparations project is just now finally starting to get some traction. I won’t abandon him.”

“You’re not the only one who cares about that, Alex,” Ben said gently. “We all love Eric. We won’t let him flounder. I think Hannah would actually be super keen to get in on that.”

“Alex,” his mother said, clearly unwilling to let the Maddy conversation drop, “what actually happened between you and Maddy?”

He sighed and leaned his elbows on his knees, his hands raking through his hair.

“Yeah,” Ben added. “You seemed so happy and in love at the wedding. And then next thing we know you’re not together anymore.”

“She’d been hounded by the press in the States after her husband died and she couldn’t take it anymore, so her father sent her to London to work for the ambassador. She literally came here to escape the press. We were never supposed to be anything besides casual. Once the media found out about us, it didn’t make sense for her to keep hiding here. She got accepted to a grad program in foreign affairs at Georgetown, and it felt like the sign she needed to accept the offer. She had just broken things off the night that you…” It was still hard to say. “The night that you had your surgery.” It felt good to get all of that off his chest. Other than a few hurried conversations with Eric about what had happened amongst all the drama ar ound his mother’s health, he really hadn’t talked to anyone about it at all.

Recognition dawned in Ben’s eyes. “So wait, the day that Hannah texted her to come get you out of the hospital…”

“We’d already broken up,” Alex confirmed. “I just hadn’t really processed any of it. She literally said she thought we should end things and then my phone was ringing and Graham came in and said I had to leave right away.”

“Shit, mate,” Ben said. “I had no idea.”

“Of course you didn’t. Way more important things were happening,” Alex replied.

“But was it super awkward?”

“No.” Alex sighed. “I mean, I was basically a husk of a human. I hadn’t slept, hadn’t left the hospital in days, I hadn’t processed anything. She took me on a walk, and we pretty much just pretended it hadn’t happened. But then at the end of the night, she was being so sweet, and I just kept forgetting… I told her I didn’t think we could hang out if we weren’t going to be together.”

Their mother sighed. “I’m so sorry, darling.”

“Gosh, Mum, how dare you have a medical emergency at such an inconvenient time!” Ben quipped sarcastically.

“I just, I knew it was hard on you boys, but between your honeymoon being ruined, and Alex also going through so much personally… I’m just sorry that there was extra hurt besides just me being sick.”

“I mean, the bright side of all of it is that you did a great job of pulling focus,” Alex said drily. “If that hadn’t happened, Maddy wouldn’t have been able to leave the house for weeks, and our breakup would have been a much bigger deal.”

“Always happy to create a scene, darling,” the queen said airily. “I just hope that next time it doesn’t come with such an unsightly scar. I may never wear a bikini again!”

“Okay, but back to you, Alex,” Ben said, blinking rapidly in a way that told Alex he was trying to erase the mental image of their mother in a bikini. “Do you actually want to be doing this work? I know you don’t have the stage fright you did when we were kids, but being a working royal isn’t for the faint of heart. If this isn’t what you want to be doing or where you want to be, that’s okay, mate. We want you around, but only if this is where you truly want to be.”

Alex sighed and let himself really think about it for the first time. He was definitely thriving on the feeling of being useful, of helping out the family cause, of being one of the drivers behind significant institutional change…in as much as someone whose heart had been thoroughly broken could be thriving, that is. But his mother wasn’t wrong. He had thrown himself into work. It was the easiest way to keep himself from missing Maddy so much. But it was exhausting being “on” all the time. With the exception of the family Sunday night dinners and the occasional hangout with Hannah and Ben, he really hadn’t had a social life since Maddy.

“I mean…” he started.

“Do you still love her?” his mother asked gently.

His head fell. “Yes,” he breathed out. “I feel like my heart has been run over by a steamroller.”

“Finally! He admits it!” One didn’t get to be queen for decades without a flair for the dramatic, Alex was reminded.

“Okay, but what do you expect me to do about it?” he asked, exasperatedly, raking a hand through his hair.

“Go. To. Her.” She said it as if he was very stupid.

“But you all need me here.”

“We’ll find a way to soldier on without you,” Ben said matter-of-factly. “I mean, we’ll miss you and you better come visit, but we want to hang out with happy Alex, not ‘work myself to the bone to avoid my feelings’ Alex.”

“But I haven’t been invited.”

The queen leveled him with her own look of exasperation. “ Alex, for someone who purportedly shagged his way through the entire upper crust of British society for years, you know shockingly little about romance.”

“I didn’t—” She silenced him with a glance. “Okay, I might not have described it exactly that way.”

“Alex, your relationship might not have been public knowledge, but the impact she had on you was crystal clear. We all noticed that you were happier than we’d seen you in years last spring. I don’t think there’s any way she could have been making you that happy if you weren’t having a similar impact on her. If you still love her, I highly doubt, given the rationale you provided for the breakup, that she doesn’t feel similarly.”

Alex sighed again. “It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

“Her father is a three-star general. She spent her entire childhood being moved around at the whims of his job. And then she married Evan. And even though she’d wanted to go to graduate school for years, they kept having to move for his job. It took me weeks to convince her to even entertain the idea of a relationship with me because she was so opposed to the idea of losing control of her life right after she’d just taken the reins for the first time ever. We were never supposed to be more than just casually dating… and then we both let it get serious. She didn’t even tell me she had gotten into Georgetown until she’d already sent in the paperwork to go because she needed it to be based only on what she wanted. So, yeah. I’m so proud of her for doing this, but I think it’s something she needs to do for herself. I don’t actually know that she wants me there.”

His mother smiled at him sadly. “My darling, she’s a military daughter and a military widow. You just said it yourself. Her sense of duty to family and service is on overdrive. Is it possible she didn’t ask because she didn’t want to put you in the position of having to choose between doing your duty to the family and going with her? That she’s spent so much of her life doing her duty that it might not have even occurred to her that you might be willing to relocate for her?”

Alex blinked, stunned. It truly hadn’t ever occurred to him. But as his mother’s words sank in, he became increasingly sure that she had hit the nail on the head. Maddy had ended things with him only days after telling him she loved him. The way she felt hadn’t changed. It was the realization that to get what she wanted – a relationship with him – his life would have been disrupted. And it was just like her to sacrifice something she wanted for fear of inconveniencing someone. He was suddenly certain of it. But now that he’d finally found a purpose in London, he was faced with a decision: did he stay and do his duty to his country and his family? Or did he take the leap of faith and hope Maddy would be happy to see him?

“Don’t forget, your first essay is due at the end of next week and the second quiz is the week after. Have a good weekend, y’all.” Maddy felt her energy level drain immediately as her students started shoving notebooks and computers into their backpacks and rushing for the door. The only thing worse than enrolling in a discussion section Friday afternoon at three p.m. was teaching one. She had landed a coveted spot as a TA for the international relations course required of all first-year students in Georgetown’s government major, but as a first-year grad student, she had gotten last pick of the discussion sections and had wound up with two eight a.m. sections and the dreaded Friday afternoon slot. By the end of the week she was always exhausted.

Maddy had settled in well at Georgetown. After Nadia and Alex had each made a few joking comments about how little she’d put her own mark on her rooms in London, she’d made an effort to hang art on the walls and put out some framed photos of herself with her parents and college friends. She’d even hidden a photo of her and Alex that someone had taken the night of his brother’s wedding in the drawer of her nightstand. She only let herself look at it in the really low moments. She’d thrown herself into classes and her TAship and finding the best Thai takeout and lattes in Georgetown. She’d even started to make friends with a few of the other students in her cohort. She tried to ignore the gaping hole in her chest, to focus on her gratitude for the new opportunities she was having and the agency and independence she’d gained. But a piece of her had still felt like it was missing.

She hadn’t been able to make herself delete Alex’s number from her phone. At least daily she had to force herself not to text him random things that made her think of him. How was it that, even with her newfound independence, she was constantly thinking about the one person whose presence in her life would undo all the work she’d done to become Maddy 2.0?

She plastered a smile back on her face as two students approached to ask questions. She answered them as kindly and quickly as she could, and as the two trailed out of the classroom, she repacked her own bag and, looking around to be sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, headed out into the mostly deserted halls of the Intercultural Center. The bricked Red Square outside the building, too, was mostly empty, so she was surprised to be pulled out of her thoughts by someone calling, “Ms. Cartwright?”

She stopped, puzzled. None of her students had an English accent like that. And most of her students called her “Maddy.” The only person she knew who sounded like that was…

She heard footsteps echoing as they neared her. She took a deep breath and forced herself to turn around slowly, still not allowing herself to think that she might see who she thought she might see. When she opened her eyes, she still thought she might be dreaming. Alex stood there, a bouquet of dahlias in his hand, looking at her with an inscrutable expression. “Maddy?” he said, seeming more unsure than she’d ever seen him before.

Her hand went to her mouth, and then, almost as if on instinct, she was dropping her shoulder bag and launching herself into his arms. Later, she would reflect on the moment and be glad that almost no one had been there to see the graceless way she had wrapped herself around him, like a jellyfish climbing a tree, tears streaming down her face. She almost couldn’t believe he was real, but he smelled just like he always did—like sandalwood and his expensive cologne—and his arms wrapped around her with the strength and familiarity of slipping into her favorite pair of jeans.

He clutched her to him, and she vaguely heard the sound of cellophane hitting the bricks below them as he dropped the flowers to pull her tighter. Later she’d be glad that very few people had been around to see their dramatic reunion, but in that moment, the president of the United States, the dean of the graduate school, and a full marching band could have walked by and she wouldn’t have cared. Finally, realizing that the pencil skirt she was wearing might be nearing the limits of its structural integrity, she lowered her legs and he set her gently on the ground.

She looked up at him, stunned, and wiped a tear from her cheek. “Alex? What… what are you doing here?”

He looked uncertain again, as if he wasn’t sure that she’d be happy to see him, which was obviously patently ludicrous. She’d never been happier in her entire life. “Well, I thought…” he said, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly, “I guess… I just… missed you?” There was a short pause. “And I guess maybe I thought you might miss me too?” His total uncertainty was adorable if absurd.

Maddy reached up to take his cheeks in her hands. “Alex, I have never been happier to see anyone in my entire life.” She kissed him fiercely, as if to drive her point home, and she felt him relax as his arms wrapped around her again. He tilted her head slightly to deepen the kiss and, again, later, she’d be glad that nobody had been around to see them borderline making out in the Red Square, but again, in that moment, she didn’t care at all.

She pulled back, reluctantly, as he came up for air, and laughed a little as she reached up to wipe some of her lip gloss off his face. Smoothing her skirt down, she leaned down to pick up her bag as he leaned down to pick up the flowers, and they knocked heads. They both laughed as he put his arm around her waist and they started strolling in the direction of the Carroll Walk and the main gates.

She felt, rather than saw, him lean out a bit to look her over. “The TA look?” he said, “Works.”

Her cheeks flushed as she glanced down at her outfit. Little did she know when she got dressed that morning in a blue chambray shirt tucked into a black and white polka dotted pencil skirt that she’d be seeing the man of her dreams again for the first time in months.

“Thanks,” she said, feeling ridiculously shy in a way that was bizarre, considering Alex knew everything about her. He pulled her to him again and kissed the top of her head as they kept walking. “I still can’t believe you’re here,” she said almost dazedly.

“You are happy to see me?” he asked, seeming almost shy himself.

“Alex, how can you even ask that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, pulling her onto a bench under a magisterial oak tree with fiery autumn leaves along Healy Lawn. He took a deep breath. “I was so proud of you for making the choice for yourself, and then with everything with my mum I just… I wanted you to have the independence that you wanted. But it also broke me a little bit letting you go. You have no idea how much I thought about you this summer. Wondering if you were still in London, wondering how you were doing…”

“I think I can imagine, because I was doing the same. Wondering how your mom was, wondering how you felt about being thrust into such a big role in the family. I almost texted you so many times, but that night after Windsor, you asked me not to, so I wanted to respect that.” Her voice was thick with tears. “But I wanted nothing more than to beg you to come with me, for you to pull one of your ridiculous over-the-top stunts and magically throw some money around so we could be together.”

He smiled at her sadly. “If I’d had any idea that you felt that way, I would have bought a plane if it meant getting to you sooner.”

She let out a watery laugh. “How is your mom, by the way?”

“She’s fine. She’s got her first few appearances next week. She’s the one who told me to come here, actually.”

“She did?”

“She and Ben basically staged an intervention. They told me that I was a fool for not following you in the first place and made me see that you probably did want me here, you just didn’t want to ask. So I just decided to come and find out for myself.”

She beamed and snuggled closer to him on the bench, watching the last few touring prospective students and their families heading toward the main gates. They sat in comfortable silence for a moment before Maddy suddenly sat up and looked at him incredulously. “Was that your stomach? ”

“Possibly?” Alex said, looking sheepish. “To be fair, all I’ve had today is airplane food and my stomach thinks it’s about ten p.m.”

She stood and pulled him to his feet. “Okay. I found a place with killer burritos a few blocks from my apartment. Let’s grab some food and get you home.”

Later, when they’d finished their Mexican food and digested for a bit, Maddy had led him gently towards her small bedroom. “Are you sleepy?” she asked, looking up at him, with one thought in her mind.

“Never too sleepy for you,” he said, his pupils dilating.

They undressed each other slowly, Alex reacquainting himself with Maddy’s curves and Maddy refamiliarizing herself with the hard planes of his chest, which had, if anything, grown starker in her absence. When he sank into her a few minutes later, they both sighed in contentment. Maddy hadn’t let herself really truly imagine what it would be like if they were ever together like this again, but she would have expected their reunion to be untethered and impassioned. Instead it was languid and tender, emotionally weighty; the familiarity of their bodies and movements erasing the months of distance and longing. Alex’s gaze bored into Maddy’s soul, maintaining the intense eye contact even when he lost control. Afterwards, Alex collapsed onto her heavily, and Maddy thought she’d never felt anything better.