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DO YOU REMEMBER THAT before you left, you offered to do whatever I needed?
I send the text, staring at the phone for several minutes before pushing it aside. I wait for her reply, but a month after Amy’s departure from the palace, I haven’t heard directly from her once. Her staff has kept me informed of her movements, but there is nothing there that tells me how she is.
I note that she rarely leaves the apartment. Aliya says they’ve come to an arrangement where Amy is given complete privacy within her bedroom, the kitchen and lounge room. She does not want staff attending to her.
When she goes out, it’s only to grab essentials.
I lie in bed that night with the same sense of absence perforating my gut that I’ve lived alongside for four weeks. Longer, if I factor in the time she was with her father.
Her presence was something I started to take for granted, and now she’s gone and there is a crater in my life.
Yes. Why?
Her text buzzes into my phone close to midnight. Something bursts in my gut.
There’s a state dinner on Friday. At the palace. It would be appropriate for you to accompany me.
I am on tenterhooks. I don’t think I’ve felt this nervous since …ever. I half-expect her to send a teasing response. Something along the lines of, ‘Is there a question in there somewhere?’ but she doesn’t.
Send Aliya the details.
It’s a concession, I think, but hardly ringing with enthusiasm. Can I blame her? I have replayed our final conversation in my mind so many times, trying to understand her, trying to work out what I could have said or done differently to get her to stay. She was in shock. I get that. She had no idea that her father’s guilt was a fact. I’d told her so, but without the proof, she didn’t believe me. I knew that. We argued often enough. I should have prepared her better.
But there was something else, something more.
She was upset about not being pregnant. It was disappointing and surprising, but selfishly I’d relished the prospect of another month as just the two of us before the concern of pregnancy interfered, another month of trying to conceive, of spending nights in one another’s arms, talking until the early hours, making love, tangled in sheets and limbs. It doesn’t make sense, because the need for an heir is reasonably urgent, but I can’t deny how I feel.
She wanted a baby.
My baby.
The thought fills me with a primal rush of pleasure, and reminds me of our earlier conversations, conversations in which she was adamant she didn’t want to conceive because it was a lifetime commitment.
Did that mean she’d changed her mind? That she was now happy to be tied to me for the rest of her life?
Something like hope bursts through me but I dismiss it. It’s irrelevant. She’s not pregnant.
Does that alter her feelings, though? I understand nothing, and I hate that.
Amy
The dress is beautiful, chosen for me by Aliya. An emerald green, with a high square neckline, a long skirt and draped sleeves, it’s modest but flattering. She has arranged everything, in fact, and in a sign of where my head is at, I have let her. She organised a hairdresser, a make-up artist, removed a tiara and necklace from the royal vault, and I argued with none of it. I stood like a perfect mannequin as people fussed and primped, turning me into a perfect princess. I even smiled as she guided me to the waiting limousine, but her look of concern didn’t shift.
“It is a state dinner, so expect it to be long and boring, full of ceremonial details,” Aliya confided, smiling kindly at me. She does that a lot lately. I think she’s decided she likes me after all.
“You’ll sit beside His Highness throughout, but there is no need for you to speak. Afterwards, there will be a dance. You can stay if you’d like, or leave at this point. There is no protocol established.”
“Thank you. I’ll want to leave as soon as possible.”
Aliya’s eyes softened. “I’ll let the driver know.”
“Thank you.”
The valet doesn’t take me to the state rooms, though. Instead, he leads me to a separate area, a banquet room lined with golden walls and propped up with white marble pillars. It is stunning, its beauty only overshadowed by Zahir, standing at the end of the room, watching the door like a hawk. He’s dressed in a black robe with golden details at the cuffs and collars, his hair matching, black and thick.
I thought I was prepared for this but the sight of him sends my pulse into overdrive. I almost miss my footing as I walk across the room.
A month.
