Shaan looks like he hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours. Well, he looks perfectly composed and groomed, but the tag is sticking out of his sweater and the strong smell of whiskey is emanating from his tea.

Next to him, in the back of the incognito van they’re taking to Buckingham Palace, Zahra has her arms folded resolutely. The engagement ring on her left hand glints in the muted London morning.

“So, uh,” Alex attempts. “Are you two in a fight now?”

Zahra looks at him. “No. Why would you think that?”

“Oh. I just thought because—”

“It’s fine,” Shaan says, still typing on his iPhone. “This is why we set rules about the personal-slash-professional lines at the outset of the relationship. It works for us.”

“If you want a fight, you should have seen it when I found out he had known about you two all along,” Zahra says. “Why do you think I got a rock this big?”

“It usually works for us,” Shaan amends.

“Yep,” Zahra agrees. “Plus, we banged it out last night.”

Without looking up, Shaan meets her hand in a high five.

Shaan and Zahra’s forces combined have managed to secure them a meeting with the queen at Buckingham Palace, but they’ve been told to take a winding, circumspect route to avoid the paparazzi. Alex can feel a buzzing static electricity in London this morning, millions of voices murmuring about him and Henry and what might happen next. But Henry’s beside him, holding his hand, and he’s holding Henry’s hand back, so at least that’s something.

There’s a small, older woman with Bea’s upturned nose and Henry’s blue eyes waiting outside the conference room when they approach it. She’s wearing thick glasses, a worn-in maroon sweater, and a pair of cuffed jeans, looking decidedly out of place in the halls of Buckingham Palace. She has a paperback tucked into her back pocket.

Henry’s mother turns to face them, and Alex watches her expression flutter through something pained to reserved to gentle when she lays eyes on them.

“Hi, my baby,” she says as Henry draws up even with her.

Henry’s jaw is tight, but it’s not anger, only fear. Alex can see on his face an expression he recognizes: Henry wondering if it’s safe to accept the love offered to him, and wanting desperately to take it regardless. He puts his arm around her, lets her kiss his cheek.

“Mum, this is Alex,” Henry says, and adds, as if it’s not obvious, “my boyfriend.”

She turns to Alex, and he’s honestly not sure what to expect, but she pulls him toward her and kisses his cheek too.

“My Bea has told me what you’ve done for my son,” she says, her gaze piercing. “Thank you.”

Bea is behind her, looking tired but focused, and Alex can only imagine the come-to-Jesus talk she must have given her mother before they got to the palace. She locks eyes with Zahra as their little party assembles in the hall, and Alex feels like they couldn’t possibly be in more capable hands. He wonders if Catherine is up to joining the ranks.

“What are you going to say to her?” Henry asks his mother.

She sighs, touching the edge of her glasses. “Well, the old bird isn’t much moved by emotion, so I suppose I’ll try to appeal to her with political strategy.”

Henry blinks. “Sorry—what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I’ve come to fight,” she says, straightforward and plain. “You want to tell the truth, don’t you?”

“I—yeah, Mum.” A light of hope has switched on behind his eyes. “Yes, I do.”

“Then we can try.”

They take their seats around the long, ornately carved table in the meeting room, awaiting the queen’s arrival in nervous silence. Philip is there, looking like he’s about to chew through his tongue, and Henry can’t stop fidgeting with his tie.

Queen Mary glides in wearing slate-gray separates and a stony expression, her gray bob arranged with razor precision around the edges of her face. Alex is struck by how tall she is, straight-backed and fine-jawed even in her early eighties. She’s not exactly beautiful, but there’s a definite story in her shrewd blue eyes and angular features, the heavy creases of frowns around her mouth.

The temperature in the room drops as she takes her seat at the head of the table. A royal attendant fetches the teapot from the center of the table and pours into the pristine china, and the quiet hangs as she fixes her tea at a glacial pace, making them wait. The milk, poured with one gently tremoring, ancient hand. One cube of sugar, picked up with deliberate care with the tiny silver tongs. A second cube.

Alex coughs. Shaan shoots him a look. Bea presses her lips together.

“I had a visit earlier this year,” the queen says at last. She takes up her teaspoon and begins to stir slowly. “The President of China. You’ll forgive me if the name escapes me. But he told me the most fascinating story about how technology has advanced in different parts of the world for these modern times. Did you know, one can manipulate a photograph to make it appear as if the most outlandish things are real? Just a simple … program, is it? A computer. And any manner of unbelievable falsehood could be made actual. One’s eyes could hardly detect a difference.”

The silence in the room is total, except for the sound of the queen’s teaspoon scraping circular motions in the bottom of her teacup.

“I’m afraid I am too old to understand how things are filed away in space,” she goes on, “but I have been told any number of lies can be manufactured and disseminated. One could … create files that never existed and plant them somewhere easy to find. None of it real. The most flagrant of evidence can be discredited and dismissed, just like that.”

With the delicate tinkling of silver on porcelain, she rests her spoon on the saucer and finally looks at Henry.

“I wonder, Henry. I wonder if you think any of this had to do with these unseemly reports.”

It’s right on the table between them: an offer. Keep ignoring it. Pretend it was a lie. Make it all go away.

Henry grits his teeth.

“It’s real,” he says. “All of it.”

The queen’s face moves through a series of expressions, settling on a terse frown, as if she’s found something unsightly on the bottom of one of her kitten heels.

“Very well. In that case.” Her gaze shifts to Alex. “Alexander. Had I known you were involved with my grandson, I would have insisted upon a more formal first meeting.”

“Gran—”

“Do be quiet, Henry, dear.”

Catherine speaks up, then. “Mum—”

The queen holds up one wizened hand to silence her. “I thought we had been humiliated enough in the papers when Beatrice had her little problem. And I made myself clear, Henry, years ago, that if you were drawn in unnatural directions, appropriate measures could be taken. Why you have chosen to undermine the hard work I’ve done to maintain the crown’s standing is beyond me, and why you seem set on disrupting my efforts to restore it by demanding I summit with some … boy”—here, a nasty lilt to her polite tone, under which Alex can hear epithets for everything from his race to his sexuality—“when you were told to await orders, is truly a mystery. Clearly you have taken leave of your senses. My position is unchanged, dear: Your role in this family is to perpetuate our bloodline and maintain the appearance of the monarchy as the ideal of British excellence, and I simply cannot allow anything less.”

Henry is looking down, eyes distant and cast toward the grain of the table, and Alex can practically feel the energy roiling up from Catherine across from him. An answer to the fury tight in his own chest. The princess who ran away with James Bond, who told her children to give back what their country stole, making a choice.

“Mum,” she says evenly. “Don’t you think we ought to at least have a conversation about other options?”

The queen’s head turns slowly. “And what options might those be, Catherine?”

“Well, I think there’s something to be said for coming clean. It could save us a great deal of face to treat it not as a scandal, but as an intrusion upon the privacy of the family and the victimization of a young man in love.”

“Which is what it was,” Bea chimes in.

“We could integrate this into our narrative,” Catherine says, choosing her words with extreme precision. “Reclaim the dignity of it. Make Alex an official suitor.”

“I see. So your plan is to allow him to choose this life?”

Here, a slight tell. “It’s the only life for him that’s honest, Mum.”

The queen purses her lips. “Henry,” she says, returning to him, “wouldn’t you have a more pleasant go of it without all these unnecessary complications? You know we have the resources to find a wife for you and compensate her handsomely. You understand, I’m only trying to protect you. I know it seems important to you in this moment, but you really must think of the future. You do realize this would mean years of reporters hounding you, all sorts of allegations? I can’t imagine people would be as eager to welcome you into children’s hospitals—”