The fact that Tirith had asked for help now meant she needed it desperately. How could Maggie say no?
She left the suite, forcing herself to walk with the same forbidding posture Tirith used. She wanted to run her fingers along the stone walls, remember their texture. Something else she'd forgotten in her long absence. She wanted to wander over to what had been the nursery when she and Tirith had been infants. Surely the cribs they’d slept in were gone by now. Or maybe not. The crown prince would be expected to produce an heir sometime in the future.
But there was no time for reminiscing. And she didn’t want to make anyone suspicious.
Tirith's assistant had gone down a list of today's appearances while Maggie had been in the chair of doom, getting her makeup done.
First up, breakfast with Mother. Oh, sure. Run the gauntlet before the first cup of coffee.
Then again, if she could fool Mother, she could fool anybody.
As identical twins, Maggie and Tirith had switched places occasionally as children. But never for this long. And never when the stakes were this high.
For Tirith. It would be Maggie's mantra as she counted down the hours until she could return to Texas, where she belonged.
It had been more than a decade, but she still remembered the twisting path to the blue parlor, where Mother preferred to eat family meals.
Family.
They hadn’t been a family since that terrible day.
Maggie breezed into the room. There was no room for emotion in a breakfast with Mother. Not if she wanted to pull this off.
Mother was already seated at the square table near the window that overlooked a spit of sand that jutted out into the ocean.
There was a time when Maggie had been content to sit near that window for hours, watching the waves beat against the shore.
"Good morning, Mother," she murmured.
Alessandra reached out her hand, and Maggie squeezed it.
There were no bear hugs here, not like the kind Tirith would get from Dad two thousand miles away from here.
"You look tired, dear."
Maggie had to stifle a hysterical giggle as she sat on the opposite side of the table. Had it really only been yesterday morning that she'd sat across from Scarlett, arguing over whether she was too nice?
This breakfast was as different from that one as a Brahma bull was from a pasture of Holstein milk cows.
Fine white linen covered the table and fell halfway to the floor. Exquisite china and real silver tableware were a reminder that she had to be careful. Always be careful.
The staff hovered about, moving silently and efficiently. A young man in the dove-gray palace uniform put a plate of sliced fruit and baked ham and an egg over-easy on the table in front of Maggie.
A young woman poured tea into Mother's cup first, then Maggie's. Tea? Not coffee?
She might only be here for fourteen days, but she might die without her daily coffee fix.
Remembering Mother's comment, she made her lips form a serene smile. Tirith was always serene, wasn't she? "I'm fine."
Mother's eyes were on the spoon she was slowly stirring her tea with. "Your father called."
Maggie's stomach lurched as it had when she was fifteen and had climbed on the back of a steer to feel what it was like to ride a bull. Serenity was hard to fake. "Oh?"
She hadn’t thought Gideon and Alessandra still spoke. Everything between them was amicable and mostly handled through Mother's personal assistant.
But the divide was there, an impassable rift wider than the ocean between them. Maggie's fault.
She swallowed hard, but Mother didn't look up to see the emotion she couldn't quite hide.
