"I can do it," she said. The words tasted like iron. She said them anyway.
"Good." Julia's voice was gentle but her eyes were already calculating: timing, logistics, messaging. "I'll draft some notes for you. You won't read from a script. It needs to feel genuine. But I'll give you the structure. Three beats: acknowledge what happened, appeal for information, address Florence directly. Keep it under two minutes. Look at the camera, not the desk."
"I know how to speak to a camera, Julia."
"I know you do. But I also know that you've never done it with your daughter missing. So I'm going to say the things you already know, because right now the things you know might not be the things you remember."
Alexandra nodded. Julia was right. She was always right about this.
Julia stood and was already on her phone. Charlotte remained seated, her grey eyes steady on Alexandra's face, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Then Charlotte said, very quietly: "You're stronger than you think you are."
Alexandra didn't know if that was true. She didn't know anything right now except that Florence was gone and the cameras were waiting and she had to stand up.
She stood up.
Julia returned with a makeup artist, one of the palace team who'd been brought along for the weekend. The woman was professional and quick, working in silence, covering the worst of the redness around Alexandra's eyes with concealer, smoothing her hair, applying a light coat of lipstick that made her look less like a woman who'd been weeping for two hours. Alexandra sat still and let it happen. The routine was familiar. She'd been made up for cameras since she was nineteen. Her face knew what to do even when her mind couldn't follow.
They moved to the library. The castle's library was smaller than the one at the palace but more beautiful: floor-to-ceiling shelves of leather-bound volumes, a bay window overlooking the south lawn, the evening light painting everything in tones of amber and bronze. Two cameras had been set up on tripods, flanking a mahogany desk with the royal standard draped behind it. The room smelled of old books and wood polish and the lighting was warm and soft. Julia positioned her behind the desk and placed a glass of water within reach and a single sheet of paper with three handwritten bullet points that Alexandra wouldn't need but was grateful to have. A small monitor showed what the cameras were seeing: a woman in a cornflower-blue silk blouse, her blonde hair neat, her expression composed. Alexandra barely recognised herself. The woman on the screen looked calm. The woman behind the desk was shaking.
Julia counted her in. The red light on the camera went on.
Alexandra looked into the lens and spoke.
"This afternoon, our daughter Princess Florence was taken from us while at our family's country estate. She is eight years old. She is kind, she is brave, and she is loved beyond measure."
Her voice was steady. She didn't know how. Somewhere beneath the terror, the decades of training were holding her together, the muscle memory of public address, the learned ability to project calm when everything inside her was on fire.
"I am speaking to you not only as your Queen, but as a mother. I am asking for your help. If you have seen anything, if you know anything, please contact the police or the numbers displayed on your screens. Every piece of information matters."
She paused. Let the camera see her face. Let the nation see what was underneath the composure: the fear, the love, the fierce determination of a parent who would not stop until her child was home.
"To our security services, to the police, to everyone working to bring Florence home. Thank you. You have the full support and gratitude of our family and the Crown."
She paused one final time. Steadied herself. Found the lens again.
"Florence, if you can hear this. Your mummies love you very much, and we are coming to bring you home. Be brave, my darling. We are coming."
The red light went off. Alexandra exhaled and the breath shuddered out of her and she gripped the edge of the desk until the wood bit into her fingers. Julia was beside her immediately, one hand on her back, murmuring that she'd done beautifully, that it was exactly right, that the broadcast would go live within minutes.
Alexandra didn't hear her. She was thinking about Florence watching this somewhere. Or not watching, because maybe whoever had her wouldn't let her see a television. Maybe Florence didn't know that the whole country was about to see her mother on their screens. Maybe Florence was in a room somewhere wondering why Mummy Alex and Mummy Erin hadn't come to find her yet.
Or maybe Florence was watching. Maybe she was sitting in a strange room in front of a strange television with strange people around her, and she would see Alexandra's face and hear her voice and know that she was not forgotten. That her mothers were fighting. That love was louder than distance.
The thought split her open. She pressed her fist against her mouth and breathed through it, one breath at a time, while the cameras were packed away and the library returned to silence and the evening light came through the tall windows and turned the spines of the books to gold.
Charlotte was waiting in the corridor. She'd stayed the entire time. Stayed through the makeup and the cameras and thebroadcast, standing somewhere out of frame, bearing witness. Their eyes met and Charlotte gave her a single nod. No platitudes. No promises. Just acknowledgment. One woman to another.
Alexandra returned the nod and walked back to the living room to hold her remaining children and wait for news that might never come.
6
The security control room was thick with the smell of stale coffee and tension and the low hum of equipment that never slept. Someone had brought in a tray of mugs and biscuits that no one had touched. The fluorescent lights cast their flat, unforgiving glare over the table and the faces and the maps. The monitors on the far wall cycled through camera feeds from the estate perimeter: the gates, the service roads, the empty bridle path where Florence had been that morning. Empty. Everything was empty.
Erin stood at the head of the situation table with her arms folded, her damaged hand throbbing inside the sleeve of her jacket where she'd wrapped a bandage around her knuckles without bothering to clean them properly. The blood had dried brown on the fabric. She didn't care. There were things that mattered and things that didn't, and a bandage fell firmly into the second category.
Vic sat at the far end of the table. She'd changed out of her breeches and boots and into jeans still paired with the pink knitwear jumper, and without the boots she looked smaller, diminished, her long light brown hair hanging limp aroundher face. Her eyes were bloodshot and she kept pressing her fingertips against the plaster on her cheek as though the pain grounded her. She hadn't eaten. She hadn't spoken unless spoken to. The loud, colourful, sweary Vic who filled rooms with her personality had contracted into someone quiet and grey and uncertain, and a part of Erin recognised that she'd done this. The words she'd thrown at Vic in this room hours earlier had hit hard, and Vic was still carrying the bruises.
Good, said the vicious part of her brain. The part that was running on rage and terror and no sleep.
