She turned and started across the lawn toward the garage, squaring her shoulders. She knew Ethan was watching, but didn’t dare look back at him.

And somehow, as she walked, each step became slightly easier than the last.

Later that afternoon, Samantha headed up the staircase of Nina’s dorm. She was wearing oversized sunglasses and a scarf, though now that the semester had ended, the campus was so empty of students that she almost hadn’t bothered.

The last bewildered guests had finally left the throne room, but the palace was still in an uproar. Sam’s mom had retreated upstairs to her room, stunned and emotionally drained by the day’s events. Meanwhile Robert’s assistant, Jane—who’d been abruptly promoted to Lady Chamberlain—kept telling the press the same thing over and over: “The palace is not prepared to make a statement at this time. We will let you know when we have plans to move forward with the wedding.” Which, of course, only fueled the rumors.

At Nina’s room, Sam tapped out the old one-two-three knock they’d invented when they were children. The door swung open, revealing not Nina, but her mom.

“Oh—hi,” Sam said, surprised. She glanced behind Julie and saw that the whole family was here, all three of them packing up Nina’s things to move her out.

“Samantha. It’s good to see you.” Julie held open the door with a faint smile.

Sam loved that Nina’s parents always called her by her first name—that they didn’t gossip, didn’t even ask what had happened this morning to call off the wedding. They just treated her like any other, ordinary friend of their daughter.

“Sam?” Nina was kneeling on the floor, halfheartedly folding a sweater in her lap. Sam noted with amusement that she and Nina had both changed into the same sweatpants, matching leopard-print ones that they’d bought together last fall.

Nina rose to her feet, letting the sweater crumple to the floor. Her mamá—who stood near the window, wrestling tape over a large cardboard box—watched as she pulled Samantha into a hug.

It was a hug that Sam needed as much as Nina. After everything that had happened today, the strange whirlwind of Beatrice’s almost-wedding and that tumultuous car ride with Marshall, she felt disoriented. As if she was still reeling from emotional whiplash.

When they stepped apart, Sam scoured her friend’s face. Nina looked upset, her eyes wider and glassier than normal, but she attempted an apologetic half smile.

Sam wasn’t sure what had happened to Nina earlier, but whatever it was, she suspected that it had to do with Ethan. Or maybe Jeff. All she knew for certain was that Caleb had seen Nina run off, close to tears, before she’d apparently torn out of the garage in Samantha’s car.

“Sorry I borrowed Albert,” Nina said, reading her mind. “He’s parked in lot twenty-three. I can get him now, if you want.”

“No, I mean…keep Albert. I don’t care.” Sam glanced around the dorm room. It looked oddly forlorn like this, stripped of everything that had given it personality: the colorful photo boards, the vinyl jewelry boxes where Nina had organized her cocktail rings. Now it was all just bare white walls and unflattering fluorescent lighting, a few stray hangers sticking out of the empty closet.

The whole campus felt listless right now. A few people were still here: parents dragging suitcases to cars, students who’d waited until the last minute to clear out their dorm rooms, before university staff reassigned them to summer school. But mostly, King’s College was silent.

“I wanted to check on you,” Sam went on. “Is everything okay?”

“Julie…,” Isabella said meaningfully, exchanging a look with her wife. “We’re going to need a couple more boxes. And packing tape. Why don’t we run out and get some?”

“Good thinking. We’ll be back soon,” Nina’s mom announced, slinging her purse over her shoulder before heading out.

When the door shut behind them, Nina climbed onto the bare mattress, pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged. The ceiling fan clicked overhead, lifting the air of the room and letting it settle back down again.

Tentatively, Sam took the opposite side of the bed. “Did something happen today?”

“It’s Ethan,” Nina admitted, and the pain in those two words set Sam instantly on the defensive.

“Did he hurt you?” she cried out. “Should I have Caleb go beat him up? Or Beatrice could exile him to Canada, or—”

Nina cut her off with a strangled laugh. “Slow down, Sam. Ethan may have hurt me, but I’m not sure I want him gone, either.”

“What happened? Did you break up?”

“I don’t know.” Nina pulled a pillow into her lap and hugged it. “I need some time to figure things out.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam breathed, meaning it. Even if she’d thought the Ethan thing was weird at first, even if she hadn’t fully understood, all she’d ever wanted was for her friend to be happy. It felt especially unfair that Nina should feel such anguished confusion today, when Sam’s relationship with Marshall was finally, blissfully clear.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she ventured.

“It’s a long story. I’m not sure I’m ready to tell it yet.”

There was an edge to Nina’s voice that kept Sam from pressing further. She just nodded, reaching a hand beneath her bracelet—the one from the Crown Jewels collection, which she’d forgotten to take off after this morning—and sliding it up and down her forearm. The diamonds felt deliciously cool against her skin.

“I want to forgive him,” Nina added, so quietly that it was almost a whisper. “I’m just…I’m scared of being hurt again. I wish I was as brave as you are.”

“I’m not that brave.”

“You’re the bravest person I know!”

“It’s easy to seem that way when you don’t care what people think of you. That isn’t courage; it’s just recklessness,” Sam said quietly. “I of all people know the difference.”

Nina glanced over. “But you do care what people think of you, Sam. You just pretend not to.”

Sam sighed. She’d learned her lesson about pretending. “Maybe it’s inevitable that we’re going to be hurt, when we let other people in. Maybe we can’t care deeply for someone without being hurt by them, too,” she said softly. Certainly she and Marshall had caused each other pain, alongside all the joy. The same with Beatrice and Teddy.

What was that saying, grief is the price we pay for love?

Nina nodded slowly. She seemed pensive, all her attention curled inward. “It’s just…it’s easier to believe in things, believe in people, when you read about them in books. They’re so much safer when they’re fictional. The real-life ones…I’m still not sure how to handle them.”

Sam let her head fall all the way back onto her friend’s mattress, lacing her hands tranquilly over her stomach. Next to her she felt Nina doing the same thing.

They both looked out the window at the blue square of sky dotted with fluffy wisps of cloud.

“Remember when we used to go cloud-watching?” Nina asked.

Sam nodded, the hairsprayed coils of her hair crunching a bit at the motion. She and Nina used to sprawl out in the tree house in the orchard and name the shapes they saw drifting overhead—birds, stars, smiling faces that broke apart and re-formed on the current of the wind.

Nina shifted so that she was lying on her side. “I always pretended they were ships, like pirate ships far up in the sky. I liked to imagine that someday I would find my way onto one, and let it sweep me off into some epic story.”

“Really?”

“Over the last year, I feel like I have lived through a story. I dated my best friend’s brother—who is a prince—and then his best friend!” Nina sighed. “When I daydreamed about getting swept up in a story, it was always my story. But that’s not how it played out.”

Sam kept staring up at the sky, where the clouds—which, come to think of it, did look remarkably like ships—sailed serenely onward. Her chest ached at the realization that Nina still felt this way. Like a supporting character in someone else’s narrative.

Nina was far too bright, too fiercely self-assured, to play the role of a damsel waiting around for anyone. Nina should be the heroine of her own story.

Hadn’t Sam felt something similar? For years she’d struggled with her own identity, because she’d always defined herself in relation to someone else—to whatever boy she was hooking up with, or to her brother, or most of all in relation to Beatrice. When, the entire time, she’d needed to figure out who she was, herself.

She sat up abruptly, seized by an idea.

“Nina—will you come on a royal tour with me?”

Her friend pushed up to a sitting position, tugging a hand through her hair. “A royal tour?”

“Now that the wedding is postponed, Beatrice asked me to do this summer’s royal tour on her behalf. Just think,” Sam pleaded. “You said you needed time to figure things out! What better way to sort through it all than road-tripping with your best friend?”

“But…what are you going to do the whole time?”