The royal line could terminate at any point. The monarchy could fade into history. The decision might be Lotte’s to make. Could it be that Saskia needed to go out and get laid as an act of self-sacrifice to perpetuate the House of Orange? Not to produce an heir （which she’d already accomplished） but to prevent that heir from bailing out?
Yes. That was the ticket. If Saskia let Lotte know that she had done someone and liked it, it would be something that she was doing not just because she was horny （though, to be honest, she was
that） but out of a sense of duty to the royal line and to the office to which she had devoted her life.
Best of all, it could begin to pay dividends long before anything actually happened. Lotte’s crack about getting some had been an opening on her part—a bid to connect with her mother, woman to woman. There weren’t that many levels on which they could really have a relationship. Obviously they were mother and daughter and they would always have that. But in terms of things that they had in common, ways they could relate to each other, there wasn’t much there. Saskia dared to convince herself that Lotte wasn’t sexually active yet. She’d prefer she weren’t. But girls that age had sex all the time, and so it was a thing that Saskia and Lotte could conceivably have in common and bond over. Politics was off the table—Lotte would be horrified and furious when she found out what her mother was up to in Texas—but maybe as that door was closing this other one could open.
> Relaxing day so far
she texted on the second day of the Brazos journey. Then:
> No D yet.
After several minutes’ delay during which she could see that Lotte had typed and apparently decided not to send several messages, Lotte came back with
> How’s the scenery?
which actually made Saskia laugh out loud.
> Looking around . . .
And she did. But there were no realistic prospects on the boat. Alastair was apparently straight and single. But she wasn’t feeling anything for him and it would have been excessively complicated.
> The valley is warm and lush but . . .
she began typing, then blushed and deleted it. Lotte wanted to change the subject anyway.
> Tell the Texans that if they stopped burning so much oil maybe the hurricanes would leave them alone!
Saskia sighed, finding this so much less interesting than what they had been talking about.
It was late the following day when they made their last camp on the Brazos and were reunited with Willem. He introduced Saskia to Jules. The young man was so beautiful that Saskia almost laughed in his face. She in turn introduced Jules to the other members of her group, including Fenna, who smiled at Jules with a light in her eyes that made Saskia wonder if they’d somehow crossed paths with each other in the past and were old friends.
But that wasn’t it. They were new friends. They stuck to each other like magnets that have been brought too close together. They ceased to be aware of the existence of other humans.
After night had fallen and the temperature had dropped a few degrees, they laid plans around a line of folding camp tables zip-tied together under a row of pop-up canopies. Some of the Boskeys’ shirttail relatives had showed up with a vast supply of living crayfish, squirming and shifting in mesh sacks. These had been boiled and heaped up on this table a couple of hours ago, bright and steaming, and had been consumed one by one by the two dozen or so people of the caravan as well as a few neighboring campers who had wandered by to say howdy. So they were surrounded by garbage bags stuffed with empty beer bottles and crayfish shells.
Saskia by this point had overheard many of the Cajuns’ conversations about where they would go and what they would do tomorrow. She’d understood less than half of what she’d heard—she continued to find the accent challenging—but she knew the gist of it. They intended to head generally south of the metropolis, into Galveston County, and use their boats to assist flood victims there.
She liked to think that, up until this point, she and the other members of her party had not been a hindrance and might—solely by dint of Willem’s cash-brick—have been of some help. That would clearly stop being the case very soon. They needed to work out a plan to part ways tomorrow that would create the least inconvenience for the Cajuns. As different versions of that plan were evaluated around the table, Saskia was in touch with T.R. via secure text message.
“My friend in Houston,” she announced, looking up from her phone, “proposes that he can meet us tomorrow in a place called Sugar Land if that is not too inconvenient for you all.”