I don’t say anything for a moment between still catching my breath and trying not to have an absolute breakdown. Finally, I croak, “What am I going to do?”
“First, you’re going to send me your location so I can call you a taxi,” Lady Maier says, slipping into no-nonsense, get-stuff-done mode. “Next, you call Margaret LaFleur and tell her to meet you here. Then, we drink lots of wine.”
I glance around to catch my bearings. “I’m not far away, actually. I’ll just run.”
“In this rain? You’re crazy. Let me get you a cab, please.”
“No, it’s fine, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Lady Maier says something aboutpneumoniaandinsanityas she hangs up.
I pull up my text thread with Margaret.
Meet me at the Maiers’ soonest. SOS
That girl is practically glued to her phone, so Idon’t even wait for a response before I slip my phone back in my pocket and punish my body for two more miles to my employer’s house.Well, maybe not my employers for much longer.
I make it in the side door that leads into the mud room before falling flat on my back on the cold tile. My chest heaves, and my vision is a little dark on the edges. Then a face in a blonde halo comes into view, out of focus and upside down, but I’d recognize that button nose anywhere.
“Whatchu doing on the floor, Aurelia?”
“Trying to remember how to breathe, Darcy, my love.” My eyes are slowly starting to work again, and I catch the very adorable, confused look on her face.
“You forgot how to breave?”
Laughing at the cutest little girl in the world, I push myself to sit up. I hold my arms out to her, and she wraps me in a tight hug.God, I love this kid, the other one too, wherever he is. She steps back when I let her go, looking down at her pink dress that now has a damp spot on the front.
“You got me all wet,” she giggles.
“Meh, just a little.” The muscles in my legs quiver as I stand, but I somehow make them work. I kick off my wet shoes and leave my equally soaked socks on top of them next to the door. “Is your mother in her parlor?”
The little girl grabs my hand. “Yep. T’mon, I’ll take you.”
“Do we say yep, Darcy?” I’m not sure where she got the word from, but it’s one we’ve been working on.
“I mean, yes,” she says with an exaggerated groan as she pulls me along with her into the main part of the house.
Lady Maier already has a glass of red wine in hand and an open bottle of white on ice on the coffee table.
“Thank you, love,” her mother calls from the sofa. “Will you please tell Gan-Gan we’ll have two more for dinner tonight?”
“Yes, Momma.” She skips from the room, curls bouncing all the way down the hall.
I pour myself a glass of wine and drop rather ungracefully onto the sofa situated across from Lady Maier. I take a long, steadying drink and am about to start dumping everything when the doorbell rings. I move to stand, but Lady Maier waves me off.
“I’ll get that, dear. You pour yourself some more. You look like you need it.”
I can hear chattering at the front door just down the hall, and my best friend’s voice is unmistakable. She rushes into the room and stops short when she sees me slumped on the couch but apparently well.
She places her hands on her hips and cocks an eyebrow at me. “I heard the news through the rumor mill, too, Countess Graf. Why didn’t you call me right away?”
I drop my head back against the sofa and groan. “Ugh! Because I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Lady Maier has settled herself back on the sofa andtakes up her glass again. Margaret folds herself delicately on the couch next to me.
“Whatever do you mean?”
I spill everything, all the thoughts and ideas and questions that had been scrambling around in my mind since the meeting with the solicitor. My worries about my education, the fear of taking on this huge title and estate with no understanding of how any of this peerage stuff actually works, what this all means for the life I had been so carefully curating.
