Royals (Royals #1)(35)
She fishes her phone out of her robe pocket and hands it to me. The email is already open.
“I just saw it,” Isabel says. Her voice is still wavering, but she’s not crying anymore. “Literally got out of the shower, sent him a text to say I was here safe, and he asked if I’d checked my email yet. That’s all he said. Three years of dating, he knows he’s breaking up with me in an email, and not ‘glad you’re safe, but we need to talk when you get a chance,’ just ‘have you checked your email?’” She takes another sip of coffee, her hair dripping water onto her robe. “Are you done reading it?”
“Um, almost,” I say, but the truth is, Isabel wasn’t lying about this being a thesis. It’s like two thousand words of Ben’s feelings and concerns, and while I like Ben, I really don’t need this much of him.
But I skim it enough to see his general point—because Isabel is going to be gone for nearly a month, and Ben is going up to see his grandparents in Maine, he thinks they should use this time as a sort of “test run” for college, to see what it’s like being apart . . . before they’re apart? I don’t know, I’m not following Ben’s logic, and I suspect this is more about wanting to make out with girls in Maine than any sort of journey of the soul he and Isa should take as a couple.
“It’s total bullshit,” she says flatly, echoing my own thoughts. “He’s probably got a thing for some girl in Bar Harbor.”
“At least he’s not planning on cheating?” I say, but it’s the wrong thing to say, and we both know it. Isabel takes a deep, shaky breath.
“But what if he already has?” she asks in a small voice, and then she’s crying again, and there’s this entire story coming out about how Ben was weird after his trip to his grandparents’ last year, that there was this girl, Carlie, on his Facebook that he’d only added after that trip, that she didn’t have a location listed, but all her pictures sure looked like Maine, and as all this spills out, I sit there, stunned.
Finally, when the saga of Ben and Carlie has come to an end, I blink at Isabel. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
Isabel gets up from the sofa, sighing as she makes her way to the massive desk and a box of tissues concealed in a marble-and-gilt box. She picks up the whole thing, shaking her head slightly at the over-the-top packaging, then sits down again, tucking one leg under the other.
“You had so much going on this year,” she says, pausing to blow her nose. “With Ellie and all the weirdness . . .” She gestures around the room, at the giant bed, the expensive furnishings, the fancy tissue box, too, probably. “This. And I wasn’t sure, and I felt so dumb, you know? Ben and I have been together forever, and I thought I was being paranoid, and I hated that. Also—”
“Saying it out loud would’ve made it feel true,” I finish, and Isa looks up, her dark eyes wide. “Exactly,” she breathes, and I nudge her leg with my knee.
“See? That’s why you should’ve told me. I get this kind of thing.”
I lean back into the sofa, nearly swallowed up by the striped cushions. “You’re important to me, Isa, and things that are important to you are important to me. No matter what’s going on with my sister.”
My sister.
Who’s the reason I’m here this summer.
Which, in turn, makes her the reason Isa is here this summer. Would Ben still have sent that email if we’d gone to Key West like we planned?
I almost say that out loud, the words right there on the tip of my tongue, but then Isa gives a shuddery sigh and tilts her head to the side.
“What are you wearing?” she asks, and I tug at the hem of my cardigan. I’m wearing the green one, not the gray one, at least, but it’s over a white sleeveless blouse and my jeans have creases down the legs. I’m even wearing little pearl studs in my ears.
“Nothing interesting,” I assure her, and she nods, but then her lips start wobbling again.
Okay, so scrapping the museum and bookstore idea. That stuff is fun, don’t get me wrong, but this is an emergency situation, and hey, I now have some pretty cool stuff at my disposal, stuff I know Isabel has been excited about. Why not use just a little bit of it?
I lean forward. “You wanna go to the palace?”
Chapter 18
The tour I give Isa of Holyrood is definitely not as thorough as the one the tourists get, and most of the impressive parts are on display for the public, but Isabel, dedicated reader of royal blogs, is thrilled with this behind-the-scenes look. We stop in one of the parlors, and she touches a sofa covered in tartan pillows. “So, like, the queen sits here?” she asks, and I lean against a doorway. “Yup,” I reply. “Puts the royal bum right on it. When she’s here, which she’s not right now.”
Alex’s parents still aren’t back from Canada, which, to be honest, is quite the relief. Next week, though . . .
No, not even contemplating that.
We leave the parlor and head down one of the long hallways. It’s not as cluttered as Sherbourne Castle was—fewer paintings and knickknacks, but then again everything that belongs to the Bairds technically belongs to the country, so maybe most of their stuff is in museums—but it’s . . . grand. High stone ceilings arch overhead, and there’s this heavy feeling in the air, like all that history is seeping into the rock.