That earns him a groan, and he bites back a smile when Henry says, “You are a wanker.” “Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, and he takes the opportunity to ask a question he’s been wanting to ask for months. “So, um. Does anybody else know? About you?” “Bea’s the only one in the family I’ve told, though I’m sure the rest have suspected. I was always a bit different, never quite had the stiff upper lip. I think Dad knew and never cared. But Gran sat me down the day I finished my A levels and made it abundantly clear I was not to let anyone know about any deviant desires I might be beginning to harbor that may reflect poorly upon the crown, and there were appropriate channels to maintain appearances if necessary. So.” Alex’s stomach turns over. He pictures Henry, a teenager, back-broken with grief and told to keep it and the rest of him shut up tight. “What the fuck. Seriously?” “The wonders of the monarchy,” Henry says loftily. “God.” Alex scrubs a hand across his face. “I’ve had to fake some shit for my mom, but nobody’s ever outright told me to lie about who I am.” “T don’t think she sees it as lying. She sees it as doing what must be done.” “Sounds like bullshit.” Henry sighs. “Hardly any other options, are there?” There’s a long pause, and Alex is thinking about Henry in his palace, Henry and the years behind him, how he got here. He bites his lip. “Hey,” Alex says. “Tell me about your dad.” Another pause. “Sorry?” “T mean, if you don’t—if you want to. I was just thinking I don’t know much about him except that he was James Bond. What was he like?” Alex paces the Solarium and listens to Henry talk, stories about a man with Henry’s same sandy hair and strong, straight nose, someone Alex has met in shadows that pass through the way Henry speaks and moves and laughs. He hears about sneaking out of the palace and joyriding around the countryside, learning to sail, being propped up in director’s chairs. The man Henry remembers is both superhuman and heartbreakingly flesh and blood, a man who encompassed Henry’s entire childhood and charmed the world but was also simply a man. The way Henry talks about him is a physical feat, drifting up in the corners with fondness but sagging in the middle under the weight. He tells Alex in a low voice how his parents met—Princess Catherine, dead set on being the first princess with a doctorate, mid-twenties and wading through Shakespeare. How she went to see Henry V at the RSC and Arthur was starring, how she pushed her way backstage and shook off her security to disappear into London with him and dance all night. How the Queen forbid it, but she married him anyway. He tells Alex about growing up in Kensington, how Bea sang and Philip clung to his grandmother, but they were happy, buttoned up in cashmere and knee socks and whisked through foreign countries in helicopters and shiny cars. A brass telescope from his father for his seventh birthday. How he realized by the time he was four that every person in the country knew his name, and how he told his mother he didn’t know if he wanted them to, and how she knelt down and told him she’d let nothing touch him, not ever. Alex starts talking too. Henry already hears nearly everything about Alex’s current life, but talking about how they grew up has always been some invisible line of demarcation. He talks about Travis County, making campaign posters with construction paper for fifth grade student council, family trips to Surfside, running headlong into the waves. He talks about the big bay window in the house where he grew up, and Henry doesn’t tell him he’s crazy for all the things he used to write and hide under there. It starts to grow dark outside, a dull and soggy evening around the Residence, and Alex makes his way down to his room and his bed. He hears about the assortment of guys from Henry’s university days, all of them enamored with the idea of sleeping with a prince, almost all of them immediately alienated by the paperwork and secrecy and, occasionally, Henry’s dark moods about the paperwork and secrecy. “But of course, er,” Henry says, “nobody since . . . well, since you and I—” “No,” Alex says, faster than he expects, “me neither. Nobody else.” He hears words coming out of his mouth, ones he can’t believe he’s saying out loud. About Liam, about those nights, but also how he’d sneak pills out of Liam’s Adderall bottle when his grades were slipping and stay awake for two, three days at a time. About June, the unspoken knowledge that she only lives here to watch out for him, the quiet sense of guilt he carries when he can’t tear himself away. About how much some of the lies people tell about his mother hurt, the fear she'll lose. They talk for so long Alex has to plug his phone in to keep the battery from dying. He rolls onto his side and listens, trails the back of his hand across the pillow next to him and imagines Henry lying opposite in his own bed, two parentheses enclosing 3,700 miles. He looks at his chewed-up cuticles and imagines Henry there under his fingers, speaking into only inches of distance. He imagines the way Henry’s face would look in the bluish-gray dark. Maybe he would have a faint shadow of stubble on his jaw, waiting for a morning shave, or maybe the circles under his eyes would wash out in the low light.