Two smaller photos are inset on the bottom of the page: one of the shots of them on the Beekman’s elevator and a photo of them side by side at Wimbledon, him whispering something in Henry’s ear while Henry smiles a soft, private smile.

Fucking shitting hell. He is so fucked. Henry is so fucked. And, Jesus Christ, his mother’s campaign is fucked, and his political career is fucked, and his ears are ringing, and he’s going to throw up.

“Fuck,” Alex says again. “I need my phone. I have to call Henry—”

“No, you do fucking not,” Zahra says. “We don’t know yet how the emails got out, so it’s radio silence until we find the leak.”

“The—what? Is Henry okay?” God, Henry. All he can think about is Henry’s big blue eyes looking terrified, Henry’s breathing coming shallow and quick, locked in his bedroom in Kensington Palace and desperately alone, and his jaw locks up, something burning in the back of his throat.

“The president is sitting down right now with as many members of the Office of Communications as we could drag out of bed at three in the morning,” Zahra tells him, ignoring his question. Her phone is buzzing nonstop in her hand. “It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration. For God’s sake, put some clothes on.”

Zahra disappears into Alex’s closet, and he flips the newspaper open to the story, his heart pounding. There are even more photos inside. He glances over the copy, but there’s too much to even begin to process.

On the second page, he sees them: printed and annotated excerpts of their emails. One is labeled: PRINCE HENRY: SECRET POET? It begins with a line he’s read about a thousand times by now.

Should I tell you that when we’re apart, your body comes back to me in dreams …

“Fuck!” he says a third time, spiking the newspaper at the floor. That one was his. It feels obscene to see it there. “How the fuck did they get these?”

“Yep,” Zahra agrees. “You dirty did it.” She throws a white button-down and a pair of jeans at him, and he pitches himself out of bed. Zahra gamely holds out an arm for him to steady himself while he pulls his pants up, and despite it all, he’s struck with overwhelming gratitude for her.

“Listen, I need to talk to Henry as soon as possible. I can’t even imagine— God, I need to talk to him.”

“Get some shoes, we’re running,” Zahra tells him. “Priority one is damage control, not feelings.”

He grabs a pair of sneakers, and they take off while he’s still pulling them on, running west. His brain is struggling to keep up, running through about five thousand possible ways this could go, imagining himself ten years down the road being frozen out of Congress, plummeting approval ratings, Henry’s name scratched off the line of succession, his mother losing reelection on a swing state’s disapproval of him. He’s so screwed, and he can’t even decide who to be the angriest with, himself or the Mail or the monarchy or the whole stupid country.

He nearly crashes into Zahra’s back as she skids to a stop in front of a door.

He pushes the door open, and the whole room goes silent.

His mother stares at him from the head of the table and says flatly, “Out.”

At first he thinks she’s talking to him, but she cuts her eyes down to the people around the table with her.

“Was I not clear? Everyone, out, now,” she says. “I need to talk to my son.”

THIRTEEN

“Sit down,” his mother tells him, and Alex feels dread coil deep in his stomach. He has no clue what to expect—knowing your parent as the person who raised you isn’t the same as being able to guess their moves as a world leader.

He sits, and the silence hovers over them, his mother’s hands folded in a considering pose against her lips. She looks exhausted.

“Are you okay?” she says finally. When he looks up in surprise, there’s no anger in her eyes.

The president stands on the edge of a career-ending scandal, measures her breaths evenly, and waits for her son to answer.

Oh.

It hits him with sudden clarity that he hasn’t at all stopped to consider his own feelings. There simply hasn’t been the time. When he reaches for an emotion to name, he finds he can’t pin one down, and something shudders inside him and shuts down completely.

He doesn’t often wish away his position in life, but in this moment, he does. He wants to be having this conversation in a different life, just his mother sitting across from him at the dinner table, asking him how he feels about his nice, respectable boyfriend, if he’s doing okay with figuring his identity out. Not like this, in a West Wing briefing room, his dirty emails spread out between them on the table.

“I’m…” he begins. To his horror, he hears something shake in his voice, which he quickly swallows down. “I don’t know. This isn’t how I wanted to tell people. I thought we’d get a chance to do this right.”

Something softens and resolves in her face, and he suspects he’s answered a question for her beyond the one she asked.

She reaches over and covers one of his hands with her own.

“You listen to me,” she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. “I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.”

Alex is silent.

But the debates, he thinks. But the general.

Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She’ll handle it.

“So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?”

And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s known all along.

“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”

Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis County.

“Then, fuck it.”

The Washington Post

As details emerge about Alex Claremont-Diaz’s affair with Prince Henry, White House goes silent

* * *

September 27, 2020

“Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess,” First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz writes in one of the many emails to Prince Henry published by the Daily Mail this morning. “And you too.”

It seems the answer to that question may have come sooner than any anticipated with the sudden exposure of the First Son’s romantic relationship with Prince Henry, an arrangement with major repercussions for two of the world’s most powerful nations, less than two months before the United States casts its vote on President Claremont’s second term.

As security experts within the FBI and the Claremont administration scramble to find the sources that provided the British tabloid with evidence of the affair, the usually high-profile First Family has shuttered, with no official statement from the First Son.

“The First Family has always and continues to keep their personal lives separate from the political and diplomatic dealings of the presidency,” White House Press Secretary Davis Sutherland said in a brief prepared statement this morning. “They ask for patience and understanding from the American people as they handle this very private matter.”

The Daily Mail’s report this morning revealed that First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz has been involved romantically and sexually with Prince Henry since at least February of this year, according to emails and photographs obtained by the paper.

The full email transcripts have been uploaded to WikiLeaks under the moniker “The Waterloo Letters,” seemingly named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in one email composed by Prince Henry. The correspondence continues regularly up to Sunday night and appears to have been lifted from a private email server used by residents of the White House.

“Setting aside the ramifications for President Claremont’s ability to be impartial on issues of both international relations and traditional family values,” Republican presidential candidate Senator Jeffrey Richards said at a press conference earlier today, “I’m extremely concerned about this private email server. What kind of information was being disseminated on this server?”

Richards added that he believes the American voters have a right to know everything else for which President Claremont’s server may have been used.

Sources close to the Claremont administration insist the private server is similar to the one set up during President George W. Bush’s administration and used only for communication within the White House about day-to-day operations and personal correspondence for the First Family and core White House personnel.

First rounds of examination of “The Waterloo Letters” by experts have yet to reveal any evidence of classified information or otherwise compromising content outside of the nature of the First Son’s relationship with Prince Henry.

* * *