I’m afraid to ask.

You should be. It’s Cheesecake Factory.

When you get home I’m going to have a special reward waiting for YOU for being so brave.

Oooh, is that a promise?

Better than a promise. It’s a vow.

CHAPTER 74

2:05 p.m., Saturday, June 20

Royal Bedroom

Palais de Genovia

Principalité de Genovia

Reader, I married him.

Ha! I’ve always wanted to write that!

It’s so perfect, I wish I’d made it up. But I can’t take the credit: it’s from Jane Eyre, which I have to confess I’ve never read in its entirety (even though it’s one of my favorite books) because I’ve never been able to handle the depressing bits at the beginning where she’s stuck in the orphanage.

And I’m certainly not going to read the depressing bits now. I’m under doctor’s orders to read only lovely, cheerful, nonstressful things, which even my mother—who is one of the people who forced me to come up here to “rest” between the ceremony and reception, though I told them I’m not tired—says is good advice.

“I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series when I was pregnant with you,” she admitted. “I’ve always wondered if that’s the reason you turned out the way you have.”

I assumed she meant a natural-born leader, like Aragorn, and not an anxious troll-creature, like Gollum, who is always going around speaking in a lisp about his “precious.”

I didn’t ask, because frankly, I don’t want to know. Too many people from my past have told me too many things I do not want to know lately. This is probably only to be expected when you get a large group of people from your past together all at the same time, but it’s still a little disheartening. The bachelorette party was bad enough—though it turned out exactly the way I wanted, just us girls at the pool here at the palace. No trips to Crazy Ivan’s!

Except, of course, Lana had to show us Baby Iris’s beauty-pageant portfolio (literally. Lana engaged a professional photographer and had head shots taken of her baby).

Then Lilly had to cause a scandal in the RGG by being seen on security cameras emerging from their barracks at 0600 (that is six o’clock in the morning) wearing only a secret smile and beach cover-up (and obviously nothing underneath it).

She’s dying to tell us what (and who) she was doing in there, but every time she starts to, I put my fingers in my ears and go, “La, la, la, la, la.”

I do not want to know (though of course I already do).

My goal was to have as drama-free a wedding as I could.

But this, I’ve discovered, is nearly impossible if you’re trying to put one together in a little over a month (Grandmère insisted we move up the date, just as I suspected she would, so I wouldn’t be “showing in front of the entire world”), especially one to which two thousand guests are invited, and that the entire world will be watching.

This is partly why I haven’t had time to update this journal in so long: it’s no joke moving yourself—and your boyfriend—to a foreign country, planning a royal wedding, getting your little sister settled into her new school, and having morning sickness all at the same time.

•   Note to self: Remember to check if motion-sickness medication is safe for pregnant women. The doctor (and Tina) said it was, but double-check with iTriage. Now that I’ve finally stopped vomiting, I don’t want to start again on my honeymoon, just because we’re spending it on a yacht.

Then of course there was “the incident.”

I’m not sure I want to bring it up on such a joyous day, especially since it was really just a blip on my happiness radar. I wouldn’t even know anything about it myself if Michael hadn’t canceled his bachelor-party trip to Buenos Aires.

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” he said when I asked him why, as casually as if he were saying, I’m going to go take a swim in the royal pool, which he does quite frequently. I often watch him from the balcony off our bedroom. It’s an amazing sight.

“Michael, that makes no sense. I’m never alone. I live in a palace with my grandmother, a hundred employees—many of whom are trained in Krav Maga, the art of Israeli contact combat—and my mother, father, half brother, and half sister, who are staying here until their own palace is finished being renovated. I never get a minute to myself. Go and have fun eating dead animals with Boris and your little online friends.”

So then he tried to say he didn’t “want a bachelor party,” and didn’t “feel like” going to Buenos Aires anyway, which I knew was a lie, because I often caught him looking up “Best Steak Restaurants in Argentina” online (the way other people catch their significant others looking at porn).

So really I had no choice but to sic his sister on him. I had to know what was really going on. Truthfully, I asked Lilly to look into it more for Tina than for me, because I was beginning to suspect there was something even creepier going on with Boris than that he’d cheated on her with that single blogger. Maybe Michael had found out Boris was running an underage teen prostitute ring, or something, with the Borettes, and he wanted to steer as far away from him as possible (understandable).

But Lilly soon had the real story, and this was far from it. It had nothing at all to do with Boris:

Michael had discovered the true identity of RoyalRabbleRouser . . . and it was someone we knew! Someone from my past.