Chapter 6

“Can I just state for the record that being called ‘the slutty one’ when I had exactly one boyfriend for less than a year is deeply unfair?”

Even through the computer screen, I can feel El tighten her shoulders as she shoots a glare toward the tiny camera. “Daisy, this is not funny.”

We’re all in the dining room, me, Mom, and Dad, crowded around my laptop. Ellie is in Edinburgh in the flat she shares with another girl who works at her publishing company, and since it’s about 2 a.m. there, she’s speaking in a whisper for the most part throughout our emergency family Skype session. She’s still dressed from work, too, which, weirdly, makes me feel kind of sorry for her. “Jammies by 5 p.m. or die” is practically my motto.

So maybe that’s why I keep my own voice soft when I reply, “Trust me, I know it’s not, El. I’m the one who had to delete her Facebook. Which, by the way, was so totally not boring. I had all those pictures from last year’s trip to Colonial Williamsburg!”

“I feel the lack of a book of faces is truly the least of our concerns at the moment,” Dad says. He’s sitting next to me, drinking cranberry juice out of a wineglass.

Mom is currently indulging in a cigarette. She quit about ten years ago but still gets three smokes a year to be used in either celebration or crisis.

There is no doubt what kind of cigarette this is.

“It’s just one blog post,” Mom says, stubbing out her cigarette in the lumpy clay ashtray I made for her two years ago when I went through a pottery phase. It’s supposed to be shaped like a hand, but it looks a lot more like a claw if I’m being honest. The fact that I painted it green doesn’t help. “It isn’t as though this is in the papers, or on the telly. Who reads those blogs anyway?”

“More people than you’d think. Even the lower-level blogs like Crown Town get around a million unique visitors per month,” a voice says off camera from Ellie’s side, and I see my sister glance off to her right before she turns her laptop slightly, sharing the frame with a woman in a cream jacket and tartan scarf, a gold pin winking at her throat. Her hair is dark and sleek, tucked behind her ears, and honestly, she could be twenty-five or fifty. It’s impossible to tell.

“Mom, Dad, Daisy, this is Glynnis,” Ellie says. We can only see half her face now, Glynnis’s taking up most of the screen. “She works for Alex’s family as a sort of . . .”

When Ellie just trails off, Glynnis’s scarlet lips spread in a wider smile. “Let’s say a liaison,” she supplies, giving the word the full French treatment. “I’m here to smooth anything that needs smoothing.”

Another flash of teeth, and Dad grumbles, setting his wineglass down so hard a bit of juice sloshes over the side. “Oh, I know you people,” he tells Glynnis, nodding at her. “The ones who keep things out of the papers, you are. The ones who made up ‘exhaustion,’ as though that’s a thing people actually have.”

Glynnis’s smile doesn’t falter even a little bit, which impresses me. For the most part, my dad is the mellowest dude in the world these days, but when he uses that piercing stare, it’s easy to remember that once upon a time, he could hold the attention of entire arenas.

“Even so,” she says, her voice brisk. Unlike my sister and Alex, Glynnis actually sounds Scottish, especially when she adds, “So it’s clear that we’re in a right fix now, isn’t it, Winters family?”

I can feel cold sweat breaking out between my shoulder blades at that. I kept thinking that if I just pretended this blog post was no big deal, it actually wouldn’t be a big deal. Kind of like how I thought I could just keep out of the wedding stuff except for actually showing up at the wedding. Isabel would have called that naive, but I was calling it “self-preservation.”

“The problem with these sorts of sites,” Glynnis continues, pulling out her smartphone and tapping at the screen, “is that new information triggers a game of one-upmanship. Crown Town posts your Facebook, so Off with Their Heads will want yearbook photos, interviews with friends or old boyfriends, anything they can find. And then, of course, some of the more legitimate press will follow, and before we know it, the entire thing is out of our hands.”

My sweat situation gets worse as thoughts of me on the covers of magazines with stupid headlines over my face start filling my brain. Why would they want me when they have El, who is way better at this kind of thing anyway?

Glynnis is still talking as I fight off my panic attack, and it takes me a minute to realize what she’s saying. Only when I hear “So I can arrange Daisy’s flight” do I look at the screen.

“Wait, what?”

Mom is sitting back in her chair, arms crossed, looking over the top of her glasses at Glynnis. “The entire summer?” she says, and I look over at her, my eyes wide.

“Hold up, what’s going on? Sorry, I was having an existential crisis, so I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Ellie’s face appears on the screen again as she leans over Glynnis to give me a Maximum Big Sister Look. “Maybe try to focus on things that are explicitly about you?”

“Maybe don’t give me a hard time when this whole thing is happening because of you?” I snap back, and Mom touches my arm, shaking her head slightly.

“Not now, girls,” she says, and flashes El a look through the screen, too. “You too, young lady.”

Ellie scowls, and I see her look over at Glynnis, who is very diplomatically focusing on her phone and not our sisterly sniping.

“The plan is,” Glynnis says, still not looking up, “for you to come here for the summer. To Scotland, rather. It will be far easier for us to control access to you if you’re in Eleanor and Alexander’s circle.”

“I don’t want to be in a circle,” I reply, “and besides, I can’t go to Scotland. Isabel and I are going to Key Con in Key West in a couple of weeks.”

Mom hums, nodding. “That’s true, you’ve been planning that for ages. Maybe after—”

Glynnis leans a little closer, her smile becoming a grimace. “I’m so sorry,” she says, “but the family is rather insistent we get this sorted as soon as possible, and the summer schedule is already locked. It would really be so much easier to slide Daisy in now.”

“Easier for who?” I ask, but that’s stupid, because of course she means the royal family and Ellie.

“Daisy, we’re trying to help,” Ellie pleads, pulling her hair away from her face. When she does, I notice how sharp her jaw is. El definitely looked skinnier when she was here, but for the first time, I see that she’s really skinny now, and that there are faint violet shadows beneath her eyes. I had one stupid blog post about me, and it was making me feel like my skin didn’t fit right. What is it like to have thousands of those types of posts?

But then I remember that she’s trying to make me give up this trip, this thing Isabel and I have been excited about for a year. How am I supposed to tell Isa that, sorry, my sister pulled rank and now I can’t go?

And then, ugh, it’s so stupid, but I feel my throat tightening up. “No,” I say. “I’m not canceling on Isabel just because of one stupid gossip website, and one stupid boy. We planned this. Ash Bentley is going to be there, and she’s our favorite author, and—”

Sighing, Ellie throws up her hands. “Oh my god, Isabel can just come here for a few days or something.”

Glynnis nods and starts tapping on her phone. “Ash Bentley, you said?” A few more taps, then she flashes a grin. “She’s actually on a UK book tour next month. I can make some calls to her publisher, have them add a stop in Edinburgh. We’ll fly your friend over to see her, too.”

“Great,” Ellie says, then looks back at the screen. “See?” she says. “Fixed.”

I just sit there, gaping at her. “No, not fixed. I don’t want your ‘people’ pulling weird strings, I want to see her in two weeks in Key West with Isabel like we planned. And it’s not just seeing Ash Bentley. It was the entire con. It was . . .” I trail off because I have no idea how to make them see that this was something I was looking forward to. To Ellie, it’s probably just another one of my weird hobbies, but Key Con was going to be the highlight of my summer.

Glynnis leans back, clearly so Ellie can handle it from here, and my sister cuts her eyes to the side before lowering her voice and saying, “Mom, talk to her.”

I jerk my head to look at Mom, who is now raking her hands through her hair. She’s blond like Ellie (and me, before the dye job), but it’s a little grayer and ashier, cut in a shag haircut that frames her face. It’s my face, pretty much, just older, and when she looks at me, I already know what she’s going to say.

“You’re going to take her side in this,” I say, and Mom reaches out, laying a hand on my arm.

“Darling. This does seem like a fair compromise. More than fair, really.”

And the thing is, I know that. I know that going to a smaller signing rather than a massive convention where we’ll just be faces in the crowd is better, but it’s just . . . that was ours. Our idea, our plan, our choice. Nothing about this is my choice.

When I don’t say anything, Ellie picks up the laptop, holding it closer to her face. “This story isn’t just some random gossip thing, Daisy,” she says. “What Glynnis is being too nice to tell you is that it made the papers here, and I’d really like my future in-laws to meet you—all of you—and see for themselves what lovely, totally normal people you are.”

“Are we normal?” Dad asks, tugging at his ponytail. “That’s so disappointing.”

Glynnis takes the laptop again, giving us that bright smile. I wonder if it would be too forward to tell her she needs to tone it down about a thousand notches because that grin makes her look like she’s about to eat us.

“We were already planning a get-together closer to the wedding,” she says, “but with it being summer, this really does seem like the perfect time, I hope you’ll all agree.”

“No,” I say again, “because I have a . . . god, what would y’all say? A ‘prior commitment.’ Besides, I haven’t learned the protocol or anything yet,” I argue. “I might say the wrong thing to the wrong person and cause an international incident. What if I screw up so badly that Scotland declares war on Florida? What then, El?”

My sister is still holding her hair in a ponytail over one shoulder, her head tilted slightly to one side, and her eyes narrow. “Why are you like this?”

I shrug. “Dad, probably.”

At my side, Dad mimics my shrug. “Probably,” he agrees, and I think if Glynnis weren’t sitting right next to her, Ellie would’ve slammed her computer shut.

As always, Mom is the peacemaker. “All right, all right, enough. I’m your mother, so I get the final say in this. Glynnis, you think having Daisy over there during all this engagement . . . kerfuffle will make things easier on her?”

“Mom!” I squawk, but she just holds up her hand, still looking at the laptop.

Glynnis looks up from her phone and gives that man-eating grin again. “I do. The more control we have over this situation, the better. I know it just looks like one measly blog post now, but trust me, these things spiral.” Her accent turns that word into an actual spiral, vowels stretching, the r twisting.

Before any of us can say anything, Glynnis goes on. “Of course we can start small. Most of the bigger, potentially more stressful functions won’t start up until we get closer to the wedding. There’s no need to throw Daisy into the deep end of the pool with Their Majesties.”

Their Majesties. The Queen and Prince Consort of Scotland, who I’d now be hanging out with.

Now it’s my stomach spiraling.

“Isabel—” I start.

“Can come visit you here,” Glynnis finishes smoothly. “We’ll arrange everything.”

“I need to at least talk to her,” I say, but Glynnis is already talking again.

“Next week, the Marquess of Sherbourne is throwing a little house party for Eleanor and Alexander. That will be close family and intimate friends only, and just the younger set. It would be a good place to start, don’t you think?”

Glynnis turns to Ellie on that, and I can tell my sister isn’t so sure. Her long fingers are still twisting her ponytail, making her massive engagement ring wink. “If . . . if you think that’s best,” she says, and Glynnis pats her arm. Her nails are the same bright red as her lipstick.

“Seriously, am I invisible? Are you just planning this like I haven’t said no a thousand times?” I cut in, looking between my parents, and Dad heaves a sigh, thin shoulders moving beneath his Hawaiian-print shirt.

“The train is rolling, my Daisy-Daze,” he says in a low voice. “Best to get on board before you’re crushed on the tracks.”

“I know you’ve been looking forward to Key West, love,” Mom says on my other side, “but I really do think Glynnis here and Ellie have come up with a fine solution. And think how thrilled Isabel will be to come to Scotland to see you! Key West isn’t going anywhere, either, and you can always go when you get home.”

“Exactly,” Glynnis says, gesturing with one hand like she’s showing me the fabulous prize I just won. “And of course, Mr. and Mrs. Winters,” she adds, “we’d love to have the two of you as well. As I said, the party is mostly for the younger set—”

“And for drinking and debauchery,” Dad says, sitting up in his chair with a sigh. “Yes, yes, I’ve had my fill of that, so we can pass on the party. Get right to meeting Berry’s new family, shall we?”

“Dad!” El says, her cheeks turning pink, eyes shooting again to Glynnis.

“Sorry, sorry,” Dad says with a wave of his hand. “Meeting Eleanor’s new family.”

Ellie’s hands go round and round her hair, and had I just not had my own summer trampled on, I’d feel kind of sorry for her. She’s worked so hard for the past few years to keep things in their separate boxes, and now, thanks to one stupid blog, those boxes are about to be dumped out on her head.

“So it’s set, then?” Glynnis asks, leaning in so that her face almost completely blocks Ellie’s. “The Winters family is coming to Scotland?”

Mom, Dad, and I share a three-way glance, and after a pause, Dad lifts his wineglass in a salute.

“Aye,” he says, putting on a broad Scottish accent that has El’s eyes widening. “We are indeed, lassie.”