I smile.
I rest my hand on his.
His fingers close around mine, warm and steady. He stands. He keeps my hand. He turns. He starts to walk us toward the center of the floor.
We pass Sophie Linden on the way.
She is still standing exactly where she was. The princess pose, hands folded over the gown. Her face is the color of paper. Her eyes are open very wide and not looking at anything. She has not yet realized that she should move.
I stop. I turn my head an inch. My voice goes to the volume only she will hear.
"Thank you, Soph. For letting me have them."
Closer. Softer.
"They're all mine now."
Her body shudders. One small, full-body shudder. Her eyes find mine and what is in them is the kind of hate that has nowhere to go and no one to use itself on. Pure helpless poison. And under that, the worse thing: the knowledge that the loss is permanent.
I do not look at her again. I let Jude lead me on.
The quartet has reached the second movement of Queen. The cello takes the lead. Across the room Cass has his eyes closed and his bow is doing what it did on the Showcase stage, only now it is for me alone.
Jude puts his right hand at the small of my back. His left takes mine.
He is a remarkable dancer. I had not, in all of this, gotten to find that out. He moves the way he does everything when no one is watching him fight: spare, exact, complete. The first turn we do, the room makes a sound. The second, a louder one. By the third I am not aware of the room.
His face is at the level of mine.
"Trixie."
A whisper.
"I love you."
Not a question. Not a request. A statement. A flag set in the ground.
I lift my eyes. The eyes I get back are the eyes of a person I have spent twelve weeks remaking in slow careful work. Both of us have. There is no version of him before me now.
"I know," I say.
"And."
His voice has the small tightness in it I caught in Hunts Point.
"And."
I rise on my toes. I kiss him.
This time it is not a weapon. There is no audience to instruct. The thumb does not slide across the lip afterward. I just let him have me for the count of a measure, and the room, the chandelier, the orchestra, the photographers, the parents, the alumni, all of them go away, and what is in front of me is one person and the small bright fact of him.
When the kiss breaks, the quartet is winding into the last chord. We rest, foreheads almost touching.
His phone buzzes against his lapel.
He gets it out. He glances. He looks back up. He starts to laugh.
It is a good laugh. The first one I have heard from him.
"Trixie. We won."
He shows me the screen. A text from Edmund Ashford the elder. Two lines.
Done. The voting shares are yours, effective today. The house is yours.
"As of right now," Jude says, soft, "Ashford Capital is mine."
I look at him.
In The Bramble Crown, this is the page where the kingdom went to Sophie Linden's knight. The author wrote and so the soft girl became the sweetheart of an empire she did not understand.
The sweetheart of an empire she did not understand. The author left an opening big enough to drive a truck through and never noticed.
Jude is mine. The kingdom is his. I am the woman to the left of his throne.
The author of The Bramble Crown is, somewhere on the East Coast right now, a few months from getting an irate phone call from her literary agent about why the manuscript ending no longer matches reality.
I let him have the laugh.
"Jude."
"Mm."
"Crowned."
He understands. He kisses my temple.
The parquet around us is starting to fill with other couples. The annual ball goes on. The night goes on. The book is over, on this point, and the sequel — if there is one — is being written in real time, by the two of us, and it has nothing to do with any author whose galley I read.
Sophie Linden withdraws from St. Cyprian's the Tuesday after the ball.
The official notice goes out as medical leave for the remainder of the academic year. The actual story, if anyone bothers — they don't, much — is that her parents drove up from Hartford and signed her out of the dorm at eight on Tuesday morning, that she sat in the car with her hands folded the whole way home, that she has been admitted to a quiet residential program in Maryland for the spring. The friends, the boys, the audience, the saintly self-image — gone. The page closes on her.
I do not feel sorry. I have had three months to feel something about Sophie Linden. The feeling never arrived. The voice signature of this book holds.
By June, I am the one piece of St. Cyprian's history the alumni weekly does not have a category for. The Marlowe junior. That's the column they leave for me. People read it.
Graduation morning. The senior class on the long quad. Robes black, hoods white, the school flag at the top of the building doing exactly what school flags do.
Cass is graduating. So is Shay. So is Jude. The Lions are graduating, which is what the school calls Henry Cabot-Wells, Reeve Tanaka-Mercer, Bo Whitlock and the rest of the senior boys' inner circle. They are arrayed in a line at the side of the quad in their robes, faces deliberately blank for the procession, eyes flicking to me where I stand a respectful junior's distance from the senior aisle.
The dean reads names. The seniors walk. Diplomas pass hands. The applause is the polite cresting kind.
When the recessional is over, when the parents are crowding for photographs, Jude breaks formation and walks across the quad to me.
He is still in robes. Hood crooked across one shoulder. Hair a little wind-blown.
He stops in front of me.
He reaches into the inside pocket of his suit, under the gown, and takes out a small velvet box.
He opens it.
Emerald cut. The kind of stone an Ashford has on retainer at the kind of jeweler who calls a private cell on a Sunday.
He goes down on one knee for the second time this year.
A circle of phones comes out around us. Cass starts to play here, on his cello, on the quad, the four notes of the Mendelssohn wedding march. Shay and Bo and the rest of the Lions, every one of them, start the chant.
"Marry him! Marry him! Marry him!"
Jude, on one knee in graduation robes:
"Beatrix Marlowe. You already have my loyalty, my house, my realm, every piece of me there is to give. Will you take the rest of my life. Will you be the only queen on the throne."
I look down at him.
He is, here on the lawn, still seventeen and a half. He is still the boy I cornered against a stairwell railing on an October afternoon. He is also a man I built. He is the only one I made any of this for.
I extend my left hand.
"Yes."
He slides the ring onto my finger. He gets up. He pulls me into his arms with neither the prep-school cool nor the boardroom restraint and he kisses me in front of the entire graduating class of St. Cyprian's Academy and their parents and their grandparents and the dean.
The phones do what phones do.
I read this book before I lived it. Most of the chapters held. One did not. The one that did not was mine.
Jude pulls back. The sun is in his eyes. He says it quietly enough that only I can hear it.
"Welcome to our reign, Trixie."
I rest my forehead against his.
Ours.
Just beginning.