Page 81 of The Heir Apparent
I nodded. “Well, thank you for your service. The NHS is Britain’s greatest achievement, and it’s entirely made up by people like you.”
He smirked and plunged his hands into his pockets. “Everyone loves it—no one wants to pay for it. Am I right? I did ninety hours last week, but I’ll be paid for forty-eight.”
Everyone stiffened. Dr. Rockcliffe shot a dark look at Dr. Lee, the kind of warning shots I used to dread from my own superiors at Hobart General. It took him a moment to realise what he’d said, and then the tips of his ears went pink. Mary came forward and grasped my elbow.
“I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, ma’am, but we’re already late. We probably should be going now.”
A couple of nurses in lab coats were wandering down the hall, but when they saw us, they stopped, turned around and went back the way they came. They must have been told we’d be gone by ten-fifteen.
“Yes, alright,” I said and extended my hand. “It was lovely to meet you, Dr. Lee.”
He shook it absently, his mind already back on the dozen tasks he had to complete in the next ten minutes, my insipid chat only slowing him down. “Yes, uh, thank you, ma’am.”
I tapped down the hall in my ridiculous shoes, surrounded by my entourage of handlers and security guards.
“Oh, hey, Your, um, Highness,” Dr. Lee called, and I stopped and turned back to look at him. A strip of fluorescent lights overhead blurred his edges and bathed him in a synthetic glow. “You were right about Arlo—the baby. Just a bit of gas.”
When I got home, Cumberland 1 was empty, except for Chino. I closed the door behind me, and he put his heavy paws on my shoulders—a bad habit we were trying to break—but I pretended he was trying to embrace me and wrapped my arms around his solid trunk while he squirmed and sniffed. In the bedroom, I stripped off my pink outfit, pulled on Jack’s t-shirt and crawled under the covers. Chino slipped in beside me.
I was getting very good at pushing all thoughts of Jack from my mind, even if I did sleep in his shirt every night. When the maid washed it, I’d been devastated and sent a lengthy text to Finn explaining why I needed him to go into Jack’s laundry and pilfer me a new one, and that while this mightseemlike worrying behaviour, it was entirely reasonable.
Honey, he wrote back.That wouldn’t be a good idea. You get that, right?
Finn was still texting me daily as if none of it had ever happened. He told me about the wounds he was treating at the hospital. He updated me on Hobart gossip and told me what Ragu was doing. But he refused to talk about Jack, insisting a no-contact rule was essential so that we could both move on.
He’s okay, he wrote after I spent an hour trying to steer our text conversation towards Jack.But that’s all you get xxxxx
If I could have ripped my heart out of my chest to cure me of this ache, I would have done it. I knew I needed to cry at some point, but no tears would come. The only relief I could find was in sleep. For the first time since I was seventeen, I couldn’t seem to get enough of it. I’d been more alert when I worked hundred-hour weeks at the hospital. But now I trudged through each day under the impossible weight of exhaustion. As soon as I pressed my head into the pillow, I succumbed gratefully to the darkness that would erase me for a while.
The bedroom was cast in late-afternoon shadows by the time Amira put a cool hand on my forehead.
“Hey,” she whispered. She was dressed in her Pilates gear. “You alright?”
“Yeah, just tired.”
She picked up a takeaway cup from the side table and handed it to me. “I got you one of those smoothies you like from that place.”
“I don’t know if I’m hungry,” I said. I was beginning to like the self-flagellation of emptiness again.
She pushed the cup into my hands and smiled. “If I have to eat, you have to eat. Drink as much as you can, and I’ll finish it.”
I took a sip while Amira crawled into the bed. Thrilled by this development, Chino curled himself between us and sighed deeply. The smoothie felt cloying on my tongue. Eventually I gave up and passed the cup to Amira. I could hear the familiar sounds of the house staff in the kitchen, the clicking of the gas hob, the fridge sucking closed.
“We’ll be too full for dinner after that,” I said.
“No,” Amira said firmly. “They’re making roast chicken.”
She finished the smoothie with a slurp and put the cup on the side table.
“So do you want to, like, talk about it?” she asked.
“When do we ever want to talk about it?”
She put her face in Chino’s neck while I stared at the ceiling. “I know, it would be very middle class of us. But it’s just… I hate seeing you like this. Maybe you’d feel better if you told someone what happened.”
Whathadhappened? I would tell someone if I knew. I thought of those first few days of Jack and Finn’s trip to the estate, when everything had seemed so perfect. Jack and I had woken up together, naked and no longer just friends. We kissed behind the trees while everyone was fishing. At dinner, he reached under the table and ran his finger along the delicate skin behind my knee. I liked planing my hands along his chest. I became greedy for the new rendition of my name that I could elicit from his lips, his look of intense concentration when I climbed onto his lap. There were broken buttons on my shirt and a bloom of colour on his collarbone. And we would always lie there in the aftermath, both of us stripped bare, Jack’s hand skimming over my skin. I would watch his face while he did this, curled on my side and unafraid.
But on the last day—the terrible day—the mood had shifted. He and Finn were flying from Aberdeen to London the next day, and then onwards to Australia. Our looming separation didn’t seem real to either of us. Jack was quiet at the breakfast table, and I eyed him warily over my teacup.
