Her Royal Highness

One

I wake before the palace remembers it owns me.

That used to be my trick, back when mornings still felt like something I could steal for myself. When waking early meant the day belonged to me for a few quiet minutes before it learned how to close its hands around my throat.

In The Shabby, mornings were a kind of freedom. I could stretch time open before it filled with obligation, make tea in my chipped mug, read half a chapter of a book I never finished, stand by the window and feel briefly unobserved. Back then, waking early meant I was still myself for a moment before the world started telling me who I needed to be.

Now even my sleep feels supervised.

I lie still beneath silk sheets that never wrinkle, no matter how much I twist, staring at a ceiling I've memorized down to the faint crack near the cornice, counting my breaths until my chest loosens enough to feel bearable. The room smells faintly of lavender and polish, and something else I can never quite identify, sterile without being sharp. A scent that belongs to Buckingham Palace, no matter how much I pretend I'm only passing through. It's the smell of things maintained by other people. Of nothing ever being allowed to decay.

The Shabby never smelled like this. It smelled like dust, old wood, and rain sneaking through the windows when I forgot to shut them properly. It smelled like toast that had burned just a little too much, and laundry dried indoors because I didn't trust the weather. It smelled like my life, imperfect and stubborn and unmistakably mine.

Here, everything smells expensive and neutral, as though the room itself has been trained not to want anything. I turn onto my side and curl my fingers into the sheets, grounding myself in the texture, though silk slides too easily to be much comfort. It never catches on skin the way cotton or wool does. It's beautiful and useless in a crisis, and that feels like a metaphor I don't have the energy to unpack this early in the morning.

Twenty-four, I remind myself, the thought arriving automatically, the way it always does when I feel myself start to tilt. I am twenty-four. I have survived worse than this. That reassurance comes with a quiet ache, because surviving has never felt like the victory people assume it is. It just means you're still here to carry the weight of what didn't kill you.

The clock ticks toward six with infuriating precision. In ten minutes, the first knock will come, polite and inevitable, as though they aren't about to rearrange me into something presentable for the world. I let myself stay where I am until then, half awake, half drifting, my mind slipping back toward the past the way it always does when I don't stop it in time.

The Shabby was narrow, smaller than it looked from the street, with a staircase that creaked no matter how gently I climbed it. I learned early which steps to avoid if I didn't want to announce myself to the walls. I learned how to make pasta five different ways because it was cheap and forgiving, how to stretch a budget across a week, how to mend hems and buttons, and the illusion that I was alone when I never truly was. 

I knew I was being watched. Guards at a distance, neighbors who weren't neighbors at all, eyes that lingered a second too long. But no one knocked on my door unless I invited them. No one decided what I would wear or eat or think about before I'd even opened my eyes. There, I didn't feel like a symbol. I felt like a girl trying to grow up without breaking.

The knock comes exactly on time.

"Come in," I say, my voice steady enough to pass.

The door opens, and the room fills with movement. Camille is first, already crossing to the windows to draw the curtains back, letting morning light spill into the room in a way that feels faintly intrusive. Cyrah follows with the breakfast tray, wheels silent against the floor, while Edna slips toward the bathroom to start the bath. They move around me with the ease of women who know the choreography by heart, never colliding, never hesitating; their efficiency is so seamless that it almost looks like care.