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I sighed, brushing my thumb over the text. Love was such a small word, but these days I seemed hungrier for it than ever. It’s odd. Sometimes you don’t realize how starving you’ve been for something until you’ve had your first real taste.
Kate: Just don’t let him push you around. You’re MY sister. You deserve the best.
“I know you.”
I looked up from typing a response to find the elderly woman across the table eyeing me with something approximating glee. “Excuse me?”
“Been trying to figure it out all afternoon,” she said in a thick Northern accent, nodding to herself. “Ralphie, don’t you recognize her?” She prodded her husband, who awoke briefly at his name, then fell immediately back to sleep. “Yes, you were in the paper yesterday. You and your little girl.”
She smiled kindly at Sofia, who gave the woman a suspicious look identical to her father’s imperious expression before clutching Tyrone and turned back at the show she was watching.
“Er—are you sure?” I tucked my phone in my bag. “I can’t think of why we would be in the newspaper. We don’t even live here.”
Even as I said it, dread lodged itself in my gut. Maybe the papers had renewed their interest of Xavier’s personal life. Maybe Sofia and I had been followed on one of our sightseeing trips over the last several weeks. Or maybe even worse, Xavier and I had been seen in the alley the other night.
Oh God, what if my nonna saw her granddaughter with her skirt around her waist in a freaking news article?
“Americans, yes,” said the woman. “Oh, I’m very sure. In the local paper this morning. Adorable picture, the duke kissing his daughter and all at the airport last month.” She nodded at Sofia. “Looks just like him, doesn’t she?”
I glanced back at Sofia, who was happily entranced with her screen, headphones on, without a clue what the woman and I were discussing.
“I—well—”
“Ralphie, you still have the paper from this morning?” The woman shoved the man next to her, who started out of sleep again with a grumble.
“Hmm? What d’ye want, Evie?”
“The paper, Ralphie. I want to read the paper!”
Ralphie was apparently hard of hearing, based on the way Evie was talking to him. Nonetheless, he managed to procure a rolled-up newspaper from his coat pocket and thrust it at her before folding his arms across a barrel chest and sinking back into his slumber.
“See?” The woman opened the paper and turned it around toward me on the table.
I blinked. It was a local paper, barely the size of a pamphlet, the kind that was probably only circulated within a small area to a population with a mean age of maybe seventy.
But still. There I was at Heathrow arrivals, excruciatingly bedraggled in myFlashdancesweatshirt after a long flight, while Xavier beamed at Sofia in his arms like they were a Gap billboard. It was true—they did look alike. I, however, looked like a gremlin.
To my relief, however, it was also an old photo. Which meant none of my fears were true. Yet.
“Lovely,” I murmured.
“But she’s out of wedlock, isn’t she? Too bad, that.”
I felt as if I’d been smacked in the face as I passed the paper back to the woman. “Excuse me? My daughter is not ‘out of wedlock.’ She’s four.”
The woman just blinked, as if she’d only asked what color Sofia’s hair was. “Oh, I didn’t mean it in the bad way. Just that you and the duke. You’re not married, are you?” A quick glance at my hand apparently told her what she needed to know. “Don’t worry, love. I know the truth. She’s his daughter, no matter what the papers might say.”
I glanced back at the newsprint, wishing now I’d kept it, but too proud to ask for it back to see exactly what it said. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, point out exactly what was wrong with the piece, explicate the damn thing until she and every other person in this train knew exactly what was wrong with that logic and why.
But instead, we just chugged alone as I read the same sentence in my book again and again.
Because the truth was, no matter what I wanted to find, Xavier and I weren’t married, of course. And so, instead of arguing with the woman more, I could say very little at all.
* * *
We followeda man in a stiff black jacket holding a sign bearing my name, who introduced himself simply as Gibson, out of the Lancaster train station. From there, Sofia and I were driven another hour and change into Cumbria, skirting the actual town of Kendal until we were at the edges of the Lake District, where the farms and paddocks gave way to mountains yawning above glass-blue slivers of water.
“Do you think mermaids live there?” Sofia said as we drove around one particularly large lake, then turned onto a private road that switch backed up a large hill.
