Page 84 of Throne Off Course

Career Suicide Looks Good on You

The buzzing of her phone was relentless. Emilia had been ignoring it for the past hour, watching with growing horror as notifications flooded her screen—texts from colleagues, emails from journalists requesting “just a quick comment,” and worst of all, links to articles with headlines like “THE PRINCE AND THE HISTORIAN: A ROYAL ROMANCE?” and “WHO IS EMILIA CARTER: THE WOMAN WHO CAPTIVATED THE CROWN PRINCE.”

She’d thrown her phone onto the couch and retreated to the kitchen to make another cup of tea, as if caffeine might somehow fix the fact that her face was plastered across every news outlet in the country. The kettle had just begun to whistle when the phone started ringing again.

This time, the screen displayed her mother’s face.

Emilia closed her eyes briefly, exhaling slowly. Of course. Of course her parents had seen it. They probably had a dozen newspapers spread across their breakfast table already, analyzing every pixel of those photographs with the same scholarly precision they applied to Renaissance art and existential philosophy.

With a grimace, she answered.

“Maman, I can explain—”

“Ma chérie!” Her mother’s voice was bright with barely contained delight. “We were just admiring your waltztechnique in the morning papers. Your father says your posture is ‘remarkably confident for someone committing career suicide,’ but I think you looked magnifique!”

Emilia groaned, abandoning the kettle to sink onto a kitchen stool. “So you’ve seen them.”

“Seen them? Darling, we’ve purchased copies of every newspaper that managed to capture the moment. I’m creating a visual analysis of the composition and framing of each photograph. The way the light falls across your faces in the central image is quite Renaissance, you know—there’s an echo of Botticelli in how it captures the moment of connection.”

In the background, she could hear her father’s voice. “The ideological implications of this relationship are fascinating, Emilia. The conservative papers are running theoretical pieces on the disruption to the social contract, while the progressives are framing it as the inevitable evolution of the monarchy.”

“Papa,” Emilia said weakly, “please don’t turn this into a research project.”

Her mother laughed, the sound warm and familiar. “Too late, ma fille. He’s already drafting an abstract on the philosophical ramifications of royal love across class boundaries.”

“This isn’t funny,” Emilia insisted, though she couldn’t help the slight smile tugging at her lips. Trust her parents to approach a potential personal disaster as an academic opportunity. “My face is everywhere. The palace must be in chaos. And Alexander—” She stopped herself.

“Alexander?” her mother repeated, her voice taking on that particular tone Emilia knew all too well—the one that meant she’d caught something significant. “Not ‘Prince Alexander’ or ‘His Highness’? Just Alexander?”

Emilia winced, realizing her mistake. “Slip of the tongue.”

“Mmhmm,” her mother hummed skeptically. “A very telling slip, non? Perhaps like that slip across the dance floor where your professional colleague looked at you like you had invented the stars?”

“Maman,” Emilia warned.

“The photograph in Le Monde is particularly telling,” her mother continued, undeterred. “The way his hand rests at your waist—very intimate, very possessive. The composition reveals volumes about your relationship. Not at all how one holds a mere colleague.”

“We were dancing,” Emilia said defensively. “That’s how people dance.”

“Not in royal circles, ma chérie. Even I know that. Royal dances are like mathematical equations—precise, formal, distant. What you were doing? That was something else entirely.”

In the background, her father’s voice cut in. “Ask her if she’s considered the Hegelian dialectic at play—how this tension between royal duty and personal desire might synthesize into a new paradigm of monarchy.”

“Papa!” Emilia exclaimed. “It was a dance!”

Her mother clicked her tongue. “A dance that has the entire country talking. The headlines this morning—‘The Prince Chooses History Over Tradition’—they’re rather poetic, don’t you think?”

Emilia pressed a hand to her forehead. “This is a nightmare.”

“Is it?” Her mother’s voice softened slightly. “Because from where we’re sitting, it looks like something else. Something… significant.”

Emilia was quiet for a moment. “It’s complicated.”

“The best things usually are,” her mother replied. “Yourfather and I met at a graduate mixer where he spent twenty minutes explaining Heidegger to me with such unbearable pretentiousness that I finally interrupted him to point out a fundamental misreading in his interpretation. Meanwhile, he’d dismissed my entire field as ‘just looking at pretty pictures’ until I made him attend my lecture on political propaganda in Renaissance art. He proposed six months later.”

Despite everything, Emilia smiled. She’d heard the story a hundred times, but it never failed to make her feel better, this reminder that her parents—with all their brilliance and quirks—had found their way to each other despite the odds.

“This is different,” she said quietly. “He’s not just anyone, Maman. He’s the Crown Prince of Caledonia.”