“There’s a dog park. That might be a good place to start,” Naomi says, leaping to my rescue again.
“Wren—what’s going on? Do you have an appointment to meet this dog or not?” Brooke asks.
“Technically?”
She rubs her eyes with a heavy sigh. “I should be memorizing a course syllabus right now, color-coding my notebooks,” she says wistfully.
“Hey, look—” Naomi points to a crepe restaurant down the street. “Why don’t you get breakfast while Wren and I explore the park?”
“Fine. I am starving,” Brooke concedes. “Can we please do something fun after you get the dog, though? I was hoping thistrip would take my mind off school, not make me wish for it.” She mutters the last sentence more to herself than Naomi or me.
“Anything you want,” I tell her, though now that I’ve seen the security measures in place, I’ve lost all faith that I’ll ever get Comet back. When she’s out of earshot, I turn to Naomi. “This is the worst idea I’ve ever had. I’m tempted to call the whole thing off.”
“We did not drive all this way just to give up so easily. Do you want Comet back or not?”
“Obviously.”
“Do you want to yell at the king of England for maybe marrying you and then leaving you alone in Greece andthenghosting you when the world didn’t end?”
“It sounds bad when you say it like that.”
“Wren.” Naomi puts her hand on my arm, holding eye contact for several excruciating seconds. It makes it a lot harder to pretend away my feelings. “It sounds bad because itwasbad. As much as I joke about it because you’re living my royal dreams of falling in love with the prince-turned-king, I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, and I’m sorry that he broke your heart.”
“I broke his first,” I admit, blinking tears out of my eyes. I lied and turned him in to the authorities. I watched his own bodyguards handcuff him and drag him out of my life. And given the choice, I’d do it again.
Naomi links her arm through mine. “As your best friend, it’s my prerogative to hate him, no matter what you did first. Now, let’s find him so you can give him a piece of your mind before absconding with his dog.”
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t lain awake night after night,imagining what I’d finally say if I saw Theo. But I never settled on the right words to explain how much I miss him, and how I’m glad he seems happy but also shocked that he could be, and how I’m sad that our week together turned out to be so easily erased from history and his life.
Maybe when I see him today, the right words will finally come.
Naomi leads me down the shaded sidewalk, away from the guards and the largest concentration of crowds, until we find another, smaller entrance. We enter High Park and the noise from the crowds and cars is muffled by dense trees. Naomi finds a park map and traces the path toward the off-leash dog park with her finger. My nerves wind tighter as we pass the greenhouse and then the zoo, and I hold my breath as we enter the dog park.
We stop cold and Naomi looks around skeptically. “I’m sorry, I just can’t picture them here.”
The dog park is a small patch of sand with a couple of picnic tables and benches scattered throughout, and not a member of the royal family in sight.
“Should we wait?” I ask uncertainly.
“They are not doing a royal photo op here,” Naomi says, gesturing to a large pile of dog poop. “Let’s double back, there’s nothing on the north side except a sports complex.”
We turn around and follow the paved path to an elaborate circular garden with a maple-leaf-shaped flower bed at its center. “Okay, Canada, that’s very on-brand,” I say, ignoring the familiar itch to take a picture of the trees on the banks of a rippling pond. After the comet didn’t hit, I thought I wanted to keep memories of everything, but if this rescue mission is unsuccessful, I won’t want any record of this temporary insanity. “That has to be agood sign.” I point to the crowd-control barriers lining the walkway.
Naomi has her phone out. “Wikipedia says that Theo’s grandmother opened this garden in the 1950s. Maybe he’ll repeat history.”
I’m immediately annoyed with myself for not doing any research. “I need a minute.” I pace around the garden, trying to summon whatever magic I had in Europe that got Theo and me out of so many impossible situations.
I used to be the girl with plans A, B, C, and D—backup plans for my backup plans—but now? My brain is a ghost town. As hard as I try, I can’t think of a single way to track down and steal the most famous dog in the world.
“I’m broken,” I tell Naomi when I’ve completed my lap around the maple leaf. She’s sitting on a bench, and I glance over her shoulder at her phone, where she’s watching another orientation video for school I haven’t seen. (Northwestern emails us approximately three dozen times per day. It’s impossible to keep up.)
“What’s wrong?” she asks, shutting off the video and giving me her full attention.
“I don’t know how to do this anymore.”
“Did youeverknow how to steal a dog?”
“I don’t know how to think on my feet. My brain feels like a sieve, everything is sliding through. I—”
