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To ordinary people, New Year’s Eve was about champagne flutes and sequined dresses and kissing someone at the countdown. But Daphne had always thought of it as a liminal state, a transition point where the old, stale, mistake-ridden past gave way to an unknown future. It was a moment of change, of excitement.
Loving someone, Sam realized, was more complicated than songs and novels made it seem. People always wanted to talk about the falling-in-love part, the rush of hormones and giddy excitement and breathless kisses. But being in love, sharing a life, meant so much more. You loved someone knowing all their scars and vulnerabilities and flaws. You loved someone even when they hurt you; more than that, you let them hurt you, because the last thing you wanted was to become a burden on that person—another weight pressing on their shoulders, when they already carried so much.
There was a blade of steel beneath Beatrice’s softness, unwavering enough to withstand any force bearing down on her. Beatrice was resolute when it mattered. That was what made her such a good queen.
She of all people knew how complicated families could be: how you could love them and resent them all at once; how you could be grateful to them for shaping you into the person you’d become, and at the same time feel desperate to break out of the mold they had cast you into.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I was in the area and saw the free food. You Americans have such a funny relationship with ranch dressing,” he mused. “Am I really supposed to dip celery in it?”
No matter how fiercely she loved her family, her role as future monarch had always held her at a slight distance from them. Her life was dictated by the Crown, and the Crown didn’t love her at all.
That was the thing about people who had known you since childhood: they understood you in ways that you didn’t even understand yourself. They could hurt you better than anyone, even when they didn’t mean to.
And what was love if not a form of faith? When you fell in love, you took your whole heart and gave it into someone else’s keeping.
It’s never the right thing to pledge your heart and not mean it.”
Love could only ever strengthen you; it lifted you up and made you a better version of yourself.
