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“I know the feeling,” Henry says softly.
The quiet ebbs and flows after a while, the London night black and pressing in against the windowpanes. David the beagle curls up protectively at Henry’s side, and Bea picks a Bowie song to play. She sings under her breath, “I, I will be king, and you, you will be queen,” and Alex almost laughs. It feels like how Zahra has described hurricane days to him: stuck together, hoping the sandbags will hold.
Henry drifts asleep at some point, and Alex is thankful for it, but he can still feel tension in every part of Henry’s body against him.
“He hasn’t slept since the news,” Bea tells him quietly.
Alex nods slightly, searching her face. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“I feel like he’s not telling me something,” Alex whispers. “I believe him when he says he’s in, and he wants to tell everyone the truth. But there’s something else he’s not saying, and it’s freaking me out that I can’t figure out what it is.”
Bea looks up, her fingers stilling. “Oh, love,” she says simply. “He misses Dad.”
Oh.
He sighs, putting his head in his hands. Of course.
“Can you explain?” he attempts lamely. “What that’s like? What I can do?”
She shifts on her pouf, repositioning the harp onto the floor, and reaches into her sweater. She withdraws a silver coin on a chain: her sobriety chip.
“D’you mind if I go a bit sponsor?” she asks with a smirk. He offers her a weak half smile, and she continues.
“So, imagine we’re all born with a set of feelings. Some are broader or deeper than others, but for everyone, there’s that ground floor, a bottom crust of the pie. That’s the maximum depth of feeling you’ve ever experienced. And then, the worst thing happens to you. The very worst thing that could have happened. The thing you had nightmares about as a child, and you thought, it’s all right because that thing will happen to me when I’m older and wiser, and I’ll have felt so many feelings by then that this one worst feeling, the worst possible feeling, won’t seem so terrible.
“But it happens to you when you’re young. It happens when your brain isn’t even fully done cooking—when you’ve barely experienced anything, really. The worst thing is one of the first big things that ever happens to you in your life. It happens to you, and it goes all the way down to the bottom of what you know how to feel, and it rips it open and carves out this chasm down below to make room. And because you were so young, and because it was one of the first big things to happen in your life, you’ll always carry it inside you. Every time something terrible happens to you from then on, it doesn’t just stop at the bottom—it goes all the way down.”
She reaches across the tiny tea table and the sad little pile of water crackers and touches the back of Alex’s hand.
“Do you understand?” she asks him, looking right into his eyes. “You need to understand this to be with Henry. He is the most loving, nurturing, selfless person you could hope to meet, but there is a sadness and a hurt in him that is tremendous,and you may very well never truly understand it, but you need to love it as much as you love the rest of him, because that’s him. That is him, part and parcel. And he is prepared to give it all to you, which is far more than I ever, in a thousand years, thought I would see him do.”
Alex sits, trying for a long moment to absorb it, and says, “I’ve never… I haven’t been through anything like that,” he says, voice rough. “But I’ve always felt it, in him. There’s this side of him that’s… unknowable.” He takes a breath. “But the thing is, jumping off cliffs is kinda my thing. That’s the choice. I love him, with all that,becauseof all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.”
Bea smiles gently. “Then you’ll do fine.”
Sometime around four in the morning, he climbs into bed behind Henry, Henry whose spine pokes out in soft points, Henry who has been through the worst thing and now the next worst thing and is still alive. He reaches out a hand and touches the ridge of Henry’s shoulder blade, the skin where the sheet has slid off him, where his lungs stubbornly refuse to stop pulling air. Six feet of boy curled around kicked-in ribs and a recalcitrant heart.
Carefully, his chest to Henry’s back, he slots himself into place.
“It’s foolishness, Henry,” Philip is saying. “You’re too young to understand.”
Alex’s ears are ringing.
They sat down in Henry’s kitchen this morning with scones and a note from Bea that she’d gone to meet with Catherine. And then suddenly, Philip was bursting through the door,suit askew, hair uncombed, shouting at Henry about the nerve to break the communications embargo, to bring Alex here while the palace is being watched, to keep embarrassing the family.
Presently, Alex is thinking about breaking his nose with the coffee percolator.
“I’mtwenty-three,Philip,” Henry says, audibly struggling to keep his voice even. “Mum was barely more than that when she met Dad.”
“Yes, and you think that was awisedecision?” Philip says nastily. “Marrying a man who spent half our childhoods making films, who never served his country, who got sick andleftus and Mum—”
“Don’t,Philip,” Henry says. “I swear to God. Just because your obsession with family legacy didn’t impresshim—”
“You clearly don’t know the first fucking thing about what a legacy means if you can let something like this happen,” Philip snaps. “The only thing to do now is bury it and hope that somehow people will believe that none of it was real. That’s your duty, Henry. It’s theleastyou can do.”
“I’m sorry,” Henry says, sounding wretched, but there’s a bitter defiance rising in him too. “I’m sorry that I’m such adisgracefor being the way I am.”
