Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin [117]
"Nifty? Brilliant? Smashing?" Ethan offers.
I nod. "All of those. Yes."
"Feeling better?" he asks.
He is trying so hard. Between his efforts and the beer I feel somewhat healed, at least temporarily. I consider that I am thousands of miles away from Dex. Dexter—who did have my name as an option when he chose, instead, to check the box next to Darcy's name. "Yes. A little better. Yes."
"Well, let's recap. We determined that I never picked Darcy over you. And that she didn't get into Notre Dame."
"But she did get Dex."
"Forget him. He's not worth it," Ethan says, and then glances up at the menu scrawled on a blackboard behind us. "Now. Let's get you some fish and chips."
We eat lunch—fish, French fries, and mushy peas that remind me of baby food. Comfort food. And we have a couple more pints. Then I suggest that we go for a walk, see something England-y. So he takes me into Kensington Gardens and shows me Kensington Palace, where Princess Diana lived.
"See this gate? That's where they piled all the flowers and letters when she died. Remember those photos?"
"Oh yeah. That was here?"
I was with Dex and Darcy when I found out that Diana had died. We were at the Talkhouse and some guy walked up to us at the bar and said, "Did you hear that Diana died in a car crash?" And even though he could only have been talking about one Diana, Darcy and I both asked, Diana who? The guy said Princess Diana. Then he told us that she died in a high-speed crash while the paparazzi chased her through a tunnel in Paris. Darcy started bawling right on the spot. But for once it wasn't the give-me-attention tears. They were genuine. She was truly devastated. We both were. Several days later we watched her funeral together, waking at four a.m. to see all of the coverage, just as we had done with her wedding to Prince Charles sixteen years earlier.
Ethan and I meander through Kensington Gardens in a drizzle, without an umbrella. I don't mind getting wet. Don't care that my hair will frizz. We pass the palace and circle a small, round pond. "What's this pond called?"
"Round Pond," Ethan says. "Descriptive, huh?"
We walk past a bandstand and then over to the Albert Memorial, a huge bronze statue of Prince Albert perched on a throne. "You like?"
"It's pretty," I say.
"A grieving Queen Victoria had this thing built when Albert died from typhoid fever."
"When?"
"Eighteen sixty- or seventy-something… Nice, huh?"
"Yeah," I say.
"Apparently she and Al were pretty tight."
Queen Victoria must have been sadder than I am now, I suppose. I then have a fleeting thought that I'd prefer losing Dex to illness than to Darcy. So maybe it's not true love if I'd rather see him die… Okay, I wouldn't rather see him die.
The rain starts to come down harder. Other than a few Japanese tourists who are snapping pictures on the steps of the memorial, we are alone.
"You ready to head back?" Ethan points in the opposite direction. "We can explore Hyde Park and the Serpentine another day."
"Sure, we can go back now," I say.
"Your spleen acting up in this weather?"
"Ethan! I have to go to the wedding."
"Just blow it off."
"I'm the maid of honor."
"Oh, right] I keep forgetting that," he says, wiping his glasses on his sleeve.
As we walk back to his flat, Ethan chuckles to himself.
"What?"
"Darcy," he says, shaking his head.
"What about her?"
"I was just thinking about the time she wrote to Michael Jordan and asked him to our prom."
I laugh. "She actually thought he was going to come! Remember how she was worried about how she would break the news to Blaine?"
"And then Jordan wrote back to her. Or his people did, anyway. That's the part that I found unreal. I never thought she'd get a response." He laughs. No matter what he says, I know he has a soft spot for her, in spite of himself. Just as I do.
"Yeah. Well, she did. She still has the letter."
"You've seen it?"
"Yeah. Don't you remember how she taped it up in our locker?"
"And yet," he says, "you never saw the letter