Royal Surrender - chapter sixteen
Cajetan woke every morning, went through the expected motions, and then lay awake at night in his quarters in the palace—staring at the ceiling and replaying every moment that he and Noe had shared in the Diamond Club.
He became a ghost of himself and he thought perhaps that was easier.
Because a ghost could not feel. A ghost could not grieve.
Perhaps being a ghost was all that was required of him, after all.
“You are not yourself,” his mother said one day. It was late in August, in this interminable summer. Cajetan craved nothing but the rain. She eyed him as if she could read his thoughts, as he’d imagined “You have not been for some while.”
She had asked him to join her as she puttered around in the Royal Greenhouse, the one hobby he had ever seen his mother indulge in.
He reached out and stroked the petal of a rare rose. “That rather begs the question, who am I? And how would you know if I was acting myself or not?”
The Queen put down her shears and eyed him. And he worried that she saw him entirely too clearly. Maybe that was why he blew out a breath and looked back toward the palace.
“Is the price of the throne misery?” He felt his mouth curve, though it wasn’t a smile. “I wish you would just say so, if that is the case. So I can adequately prepare myself.”
“Do I strike you as a creature made of woe?” his mother asked coolly.
He didn’t answer. She didn’t go back to her pruning.
“If you do not wish to marry the princess that I have procured for you, speak up,” she said. She studied him. “You have never had the slightest interest in your marital arrangements. Has that changed?”
He shook his head, though he didn’t know if he was denying what she asked or wishing that he could give her a different answer.
“I suppose…” And he knew that he needed to be careful here. “I suppose I do not understand the point of marrying a stranger simply because she ticks a certain set of boxes.”
“The point,” his mother said gently, and there was something like compassion in her gaze. He couldn’t quite bear to look at it. “Is to come from a common background, with shared values, because those are what draw people together and keep them there. The hope is that you will fall in love, Cajetan. Just as your father and I did.”
It would have been easy to simply nod and go about his business, but he thought of Noe then. Always. Of that look on her face when she’d left him, as if she was being ripped asunder but was leaving him anyway.
Surely he could be brave, too.
“And what if,” he said, slowly turning to face his mother, his queen, “I am already in love? And not, as it happens, with a princess?”