Royal Wedding (The Princess Diaries 11)

Good. That scared me. I thought something was wrong with you. Or the babies.

Everything is fine with me and the babies. Except I am starving and there is nothing to eat here.

Come. Home.

I am coming home. But first we’re taking my sister to her favorite restaurant as a special reward for being so brave.

I’m afraid to ask.

You should be. It’s Cheesecake Factory.

When you get home I’m going to have a special reward waiting for YOU for being so brave.

Oooh, is that a promise?

Better than a promise. It’s a vow.

CHAPTER 74

2:05 p.m., Saturday, June 20

Royal Bedroom

Palais de Genovia

Principalité de Genovia

Reader, I married him.

Ha! I’ve always wanted to write that!

It’s so perfect, I wish I’d made it up. But I can’t take the credit: it’s from Jane Eyre, which I have to confess I’ve never read in its entirety (even though it’s one of my favorite books) because I’ve never been able to handle the depressing bits at the beginning where she’s stuck in the orphanage.

And I’m certainly not going to read the depressing bits now. I’m under doctor’s orders to read only lovely, cheerful, nonstressful things, which even my mother—who is one of the people who forced me to come up here to “rest” between the ceremony and reception, though I told them I’m not tired—says is good advice.

“I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series when I was pregnant with you,” she admitted. “I’ve always wondered if that’s the reason you turned out the way you have.”

I assumed she meant a natural-born leader, like Aragorn, and not an anxious troll-creature, like Gollum, who is always going around speaking in a lisp about his “precious.”

I didn’t ask, because frankly, I don’t want to know. Too many people from my past have told me too many things I do not want to know lately. This is probably only to be expected when you get a large group of people from your past together all at the same time, but it’s still a little disheartening. The bachelorette party was bad enough—though it turned out exactly the way I wanted, just us girls at the pool here at the palace. No trips to Crazy Ivan’s!

Except, of course, Lana had to show us Baby Iris’s beauty-pageant portfolio (literally. Lana engaged a professional photographer and had head shots taken of her baby).

Then Lilly had to cause a scandal in the RGG by being seen on security cameras emerging from their barracks at 0600 (that is six o’clock in the morning) wearing only a secret smile and beach cover-up (and obviously nothing underneath it).

She’s dying to tell us what (and who) she was doing in there, but every time she starts to, I put my fingers in my ears and go, “La, la, la, la, la.”

I do not want to know (though of course I already do).

My goal was to have as drama-free a wedding as I could.

But this, I’ve discovered, is nearly impossible if you’re trying to put one together in a little over a month (Grandmère insisted we move up the date, just as I suspected she would, so I wouldn’t be “showing in front of the entire world”), especially one to which two thousand guests are invited, and that the entire world will be watching.

This is partly why I haven’t had time to update this journal in so long: it’s no joke moving yourself—and your boyfriend—to a foreign country, planning a royal wedding, getting your little sister settled into her new school, and having morning sickness all at the same time.

• Note to self: Remember to check if motion-sickness medication is safe for pregnant women. The doctor (and Tina) said it was, but double-check with iTriage. Now that I’ve finally stopped vomiting, I don’t want to start again on my honeymoon, just because we’re spending it on a yacht.

Then of course there was “the incident.”