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January 27th, 2001
Eloise will not go wrong with this baby.
She loves Franny. She does! But Franny doesn’t know how to read yet, and Mommy and Daddy are not concerned enough about that. Eloise learned how to read fast. Like. Really fast. And it’s the best thing in the entire world! And it’s nice to do storytime with just Mommy (and, ew, Daphne and Colin, who cannot sit still at the library), but she needs a little sibling who reads.
So, she’s going to teach baby Greg.
She sneaks into the nursery after Mommy and Daddy finally go to sleep. She thought they might stay up all night, which is not allowed, but she never saw Mommy and Daddy with a baby. Fran came too fast; Eloise had no chance of remembering her as a child.
There are so many photos of them, though. They had fat faces and dumb looks on their faces—what? Eloise isn’t afraid to tell the truth, thank you very much, Benedict— and Mommy used to dress them in matching clothes. She still tries a lot of the time, but Eloise wants to be different.
What’s the word Daddy has been using?
Independent, she thinks, and she likes that word. Eloise is independent.
The nursery still mostly belongs to her. They moved Eloise and Fran into Daff’s room the other day (and Daff cried and cried; she didn’t want to share), but they wanted to give Greg his own space.
Eloise doesn’t really get it, but she knows it’s something to do with them being girls and him being a boy. Gross. And unfair. And if Eloise was Daphne, she thinks she would’ve fought even harder to keep this little boy out of what she deserves.
But Eloise wanted to move in with Daphne because her older sister is cool and smart and pretty, and Eloise wants to be cool and smart and pretty like her one day.
Still, the nursery looks like her home. There is an armchair right next to the crib. Eloise hasn’t been in a crib for a long time—she’s a big girl, after all—but she remembers the days of Francesca there. The armchair used to be the way Eloise would talk to her little sister. She would climb up and hover over the crib, peeking in to see her little face all scrunched up in thought.
So, Eloise does exactly that.
She climbs into the armchair, her book tucked underneath her arm, and she peeks in.
Gregory gurgles the moment he sees her, clearly not asleep when he should be. He isn’t crying, though, which is good. Eloise doesn’t like when Francesca cries, and Mommy and Daddy warned her the new baby would cry a lot because he’s a baby. He’ll outgrow it like the rest of them did, but he wouldn’t right away.
“But you’re a fast learner,” she says. Daddy told her that, too.
Gregory doesn’t say anything. He smiles, or she thinks he smiles at her, and she wants to go through the house, gloating. Has Gregory smiled at anyone else? She bets Benedict hasn’t gotten a smile out of the baby yet! No, he probably scared him, and now, Gregory will scream whenever he sees him.
“Ant bought me this,” Eloise says, very seriously, before wondering if Gregory has met Anthony. Probably, right? Anthony is obsessed with meeting them all, and he spends a lot of time with them. Daddy keeps telling them they need to let him be a high schooler, but Anthony always says he doesn’t mind spending time with his girls.
Eloise and Francesca like that.
They like that a lot.
She shows him the glossy cover of the book. It’s full of fairy tales, and while Eloise doesn’t love princess stories, she knows a lot of people do, and she wants to make sure Gregory knows the stories people love.
While Mommy was in the hospital, Benedict read her Cinderella. He said that was his favorite story, ever.
So, she made him read it again.
And again.
“You’ll like it,” Eloise tells Gregory.
Gregory gurgles again.
She’ll be very excited when he can talk.
But she flips to Cinderella, and she knows most of the words because she studied while Benedict read. “Once upon a time…”
June 2nd, 2003
Eloise cannot sleep.
Because she knows Mom almost died. She can hear Anthony whispering about it with Benedict, and Anthony doesn’t cry, but he is near tears when he tells Benedict. And it’s Anthony! Anthony! So, she thinks it must be serious.
But Eloise always knew it was serious, actually!
Because Mom went to the hospital, and Eloise couldn’t stop crying because she didn’t think she’d ever see Mom again. When Mom got home from the hospital, Eloise tried to run over and press her face against her skirts and hold her, but Daphne pulled her away.
“Let her rest,” Daphne said.
Eloise burst into messy tears.
And now, she knows she cannot crawl back into Daphne’s bed because Daphne will think she is a royal baby. A bigger baby than the new, real baby. And she cannot go to the new baby because she thinks the new baby almost died too. Eloise will not go to the hospital. Not anymore. Not if she can help it.
So, she goes to the nursery where Gregory spends all his time alone.
Gregory snaps to attention when she enters, and she almost giggles.
Gregory is old enough to know what a bedtime is. When Benedict tried to put him down while Anthony spent his time at the hospital with Mom, he kept chanting it. “No! Bed! Time! No! Bed! Time!”
He’ll grow up to be a talker, just like her. She thinks there needs to be more of that in the family. Sure, people talk, but nobody tries as hard as she does. Everyone else can pick their moments, and she never does.
People at school tease her about that.
They stopped because of her father. Eloise asked Penelope about that, actually, because Penn is the smartest person Eloise ever met, and she knew Penn would know why. But the teachers treated her like she was fragile just because Dad died, and they told the bullies to leave Eloise alone.
That made Eloise feel worse.
But she crouches down in front of Gregory, and she tries to shake off the bad feelings. “You’re supposed to be asleep.”
“No bedtime,” he whispers back at her.
She tries to scoop him up, but he’s getting too big, so she pretty much drags him back to his toddler mattress. He doesn’t resist her efforts, letting his heels drag on the floor as she pulls him across the carpet. When she plops him there, she makes a beeline for the bookshelf.
Light washes over the room a second later.
Gregory stares at her, absurdly pleased with the way he knew he needed to turn on the reading lamp.
Eloise looks away, absurdly pleased with the way he knew to turn on the reading lamp.
She grabs his favorite book—one of those Pigeon books; Gregory loves seeing what hijinks the bird gets up to—and she makes her way back to him, plopping down.
And then, because Gregory is a little charmer (that’s what Edmund used to call him), he curls straight up to her in his footie pajamas Benedict almost cried getting him into. He stares up at Eloise with those big brown eyes, and he waits.
Eloise hesitates on the first page.
He points. “Pidge.”
“Pigeon,” she corrects, almost idly. Then, she pulls him closer to her, ignoring his confused hum. “Gregory, I need you to know that this isn’t going to stop just because we have a new baby.”
He took having a new baby better than Eloise did. She cried more than he did when Violet went to the hospital, but Eloise refuses to feel bad about that. She knows what could have—what might have—what was happening to their mom. Gregory doesn’t know about all that stuff yet.
“Storytime is time for us,” she tells him. She grabs his little fist, and she forces him into a pinky promise. “So, whenever you need it, we’re going to have storytime. And whenever I need it, we’re going to have storytime. Understood?”
Gregory blinks up at her.
Then, he points back at the book. “Pidge?”
“Pigeon,” she says in agreement. Then, because she cannot resist it, she kisses him on the forehead. “This is ours. This will always be ours.”
August 13th, 2006
After all of her older siblings try and fail, multiple times, Daphne looks over at Eloise and gives her a pleading look.
Eloise throws up her hands. “Why do you think I’ll know what to do?”
“Because,” Daphne says, braiding her hair with a nimbleness Eloise wishes she had (only sometimes! because Eloise is okay if her hair looks like a ‘rat’s nest’), “you can’t do any worse than me and Colin.”
“Colin and me,” Eloise corrects, just to see Daphne roll her eyes.
Then, she sighs and turns to the intruder. “Come on. It’s bedtime.”
“I don’t want to go,” Gregory says, his bottom lip wobbling.
Eloise, however, knows she can be stricter than the rest of them. She doesn’t believe in babying people, not like Anthony does. In fact, if Anthony babied Gregory less, Eloise thinks they wouldn’t be in this situation. So, she grabs Gregory’s hand and drags him to his room.
His solo room.
Anthony finally moved out, choosing to spend his senior year in a tiny apartment with Simon Bassett. They designed it in a gross way—there were posters of various football players, and there was a rug they bought off Ebay, and personally, Eloise would have done a lot more with her money.
When Anthony moved out, though, it meant Colin got his own room.
And somehow, Violet decided Gregory should get his own room. It’s the nursery, which is the smallest room of the house, but still. Eloise thinks she would have earned her own room before Gregory. Instead, she shares with Daphne, and the two of them spend half of their time fighting over where the line falls because Eloise apparently ‘leaves her stuff everywhere’ which is better than Daphne, who leaves her dirty laundry on the floor.
“I don’t wanna,” Gregory tells her when she all but shoves him onto his bed.
“You have school tomorrow,” Eloise says, frustrated, “so you have to go to bed.”
“In your room,” Gregory proposes.
“No,” Eloise says.
“In Mommy’s room,” Gregory says.
“No.”
“With Ant—”
“Anthony doesn’t live here, and we’re not calling him to come get you.” Then again, Eloise thinks this may solve some problems. They wouldn’t have to deal with Gregory sneaking out of his room all night. They wouldn’t have to deal with him being unprepared for the first day of school.
She just knows he’ll cry when Violet drops him off.
“I don’t wanna be alone,” he says, half-wailing.
Oh no.
Just like that, Gregory is in tears. When Eloise moves closer to him, he buries his face into her shirt, his shoulders shuddering from the weight of his cries. She doesn’t know how to handle people when they cry. When Daphne cries, Eloise pretends she needs to take a shower at that very moment.
So, she flutters around him, unsure, before ultimately resting it on his back, trying to gently rub circles. Isn’t that what Benedict told her he does? He always knows how to comfort everyone in the family, and she honestly doesn’t get it, but…
“What if I read you a bedtime story?” Eloise blurts. “Just until you fall asleep?”
Gregory sniffles and scoots back from her, looking up at her with wide eyes. “You would?”
“I would,” Eloise says. She glances toward the tiny bookcase in the nursery. Most of the books still belong to much younger children. Violet keeps talking about boxing them up and waiting until she has some grandchildren, which Eloise has mixed feelings about because if she was ever a mom, she would want to buy a new set of books for her kids.
She extracts herself from Gregory, and she peeks at what remains there. She will not be reading the Pigeon books; that won’t be long enough to get him asleep.
Then, she spots a library book they definitely should have returned by now. They keep hiding it around the house to keep Violet from being able to bring it back.
She grabs it out and goes back to the bed. “Well?”
“What book?” he demands.
But he doesn’t have any power here.
“Lie down,” she says, “and I’ll start reading.”
Gregory pouts, but he crawls beneath his Lightning McQueen comforter.
She reaches over and ruffles his hair, knowing that will get him blowing a raspberry at her.
Then, she presents the book to him. “Franny and I read this one recently.”
“Percy Jackson?” he guesses.
“You’re a big kid now,” she tells him. “You can read the big kid books.”
In the morning, Violet will find both Gregory and Eloise curled around each other, the book sprawled on Eloise’s chest as she snores.
February 10th, 2010
Eloise plans to track down who started this plague. In fact, she has a clue board set up in her room right now. With Colin out of the house—and gallivanting around Cambridge, which seems unfair because Eloise wants to be in Europe—she gets her own room. Right now, it might be the testing grounds for Patient 0—
No.
For Patient 1.
She didn’t originate this sickness going around the house, and she will not allow anyone to trick her into admitting otherwise.
Still, with the blanket heavy around her shoulders, she makes her way to Violet to report her most recent findings. She thinks it might be Daphne who got them all sick because Daphne has been sneaking around with boys lately, and God knows what they have gotten up to. She has told Daphne she’s afraid to ride around in Daphne’s car, and her older sister has stuck out her tongue and refused to talk to her.
Which, okay, maybe Eloise is being rude, but maybe Eloise is being exactly right because what is Daphne doing with boys? Eloise cannot imagine wanting to do anything with boys. Ever. No matter how many times Violet or Daphne implies she’ll grow out of it, she knows she won’t.
On the way to Violet’s room, though, she hears a whimper and pauses.
No, Eloise chides herself. Stay focused. We have a goal.
But then, there’s another pathetic sound, and Eloise is rapping on the door to pick into the nursery.
The mound of blankets currently eating her youngest brother alive stills, almost in fear. Then, slowly, she watches her little brother emerge, his hair wild and his eyes puffy and red. So red it almost matches the way his nose seems to be glowing.
“You caught it then,” Eloise says, not surprised at all.
Gregory sniffles in response. “No, I didn’t.”
Then, he thinks about it.
“Don’t tell Hy,” he tacks on.
Lately—and by lately, Eloise means for the last three years—they have been fighting about the Bridgerton sickness patterns. Apparently, forever ago, Edmund developed an order of everyone getting sick, and Daphne picked up the tradition. She can always predict who will get sick next. It’s almost eerie.
Gregory tends to be one of the first to get sick.
Hyacinth tends to be one of the last ones to get sick.
“If you’re not sick,” Eloise says, carefully, “what are you up to?”
“Nothing,” Gregory says, which is the surest sign he must be under the weather. Gregory doesn’t believe in sitting still. Actually, not only does he not believe in it, but he’s incapable of doing so unless something has happened to him.
Eloise doesn’t think Gregory got all of them sick.
(And no, it’s not because she’s getting soft, Benedict! Eloise treats all of her siblings with equal ire!)
“Well, I’m sick,” Eloise says at last.
Gregory stares at her. There is a clear, unspoken ‘duh’ he communicates with that stare, but she ignores it in favor of going to his bookcase and grabbing the first book he has.
Then, she pauses.
“Do you have something you want to tell me?” Eloise asks, slowly.
Gregory shakes his head, looking miserable. “I’m trying to help Anthony.”
“This,” Eloise says, holding up the book, “is a parenting book. Are you trying to parent our older brother?”
“I don’t get why he broke up with Kate. I know they’re back together now, but they’re meant to be together. Like, they’re in love with each other, El. And they broke up! And if they can break up, that means—”
“Okay, okay,” Eloise says, cutting him off because he can spiral too badly. Gregory did this every time he got sick, though. He would spin out about things Eloise had never even considered. She mourned when Anthony and Kate went on a ‘break’ because she wanted Kate as a sister, but she hadn’t…
Well, she never considered getting a parenting book for their older brother.
“I’m going to read something else,” she tells Gregory. “I don’t think a parenting book will make either of us feel better.”
“Or,” Gregory says, “you could read the section about sick children.”
“Ah,” Eloise says. “For advice.”
“We need it.”
“But you’re not sick?”
“Nope.”
Eloise rolls her eyes, but she grabs the parenting book and goes to sit next to him.
Not too close, though. She doesn’t need more germs.
September 18th, 2014
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Little Women,” Gregory says, apropos of nothing.
Eloise pauses mid-roll. She needs to make as much space as possible for clothing, but she cannot decide how many situations she needs to prepare for. Does she not need a winter coat? She cannot imagine a winter where she can wear a hoodie and call it good. Will she need to be able to wear business casual for whatever reason? Surely, it is always good to have business casual, but then, she’ll need to bring her dress flats, and that takes up more space.
Gregory sits down opposite her, and he starts picking through her clothes. “Specifically about Beth.”
“What are you doing?” she asks, swatting at his hands.
He pulls out a sweatshirt, though, and he holds it up. “I don’t think you’ll want this.”
“I clearly do,” she says, “because I’ve put it in my suit—”
Gregory pulls it on, and his hair sticks up in every direction as soon as he peeks out at her from underneath the hood. It fits him surprisingly well. The moment he hits his growth spurt— if he hits a growth spurt; Eloise would like to think Gregory will be shorter than her for the rest of her life—the hoodie will be straining to hold onto his shape. Right now, he still gets to move around with some comfortability.
“It’s mine now,” he says cheerfully.
“I’m not offering that to you,” she says.
“You won’t want to wear anything from high school when you’re at college,” he says. “But if I wear this to my middle school? You know I’ll be the belle of the ball.”
“You’ve spent too much time with Daphne if you’re saying things like belle of the ball.”
He scrunches up his nose, pretending to think about it.
Then, he shrugs and goes back to picking through her clothing. He yanks out her Uggs and tosses them back into the closet. “Anyway. So Beth always talks about how her only desire is to stay with her mom. Isn’t that crazy?”
Eloise gets up to retrieve her Uggs.
Gregory fixes her with a long glare. “Eloise. You’re moving to California. You don’t need those.”
“They’re my favorite shoes,” she tells him.
“That’s embarrassing,” he says.
“You’re a boy,” she says. “You’re not supposed to have opinions about these things.”
“You’re the one who taught me about toxic masculinity,” he tells her. “Do you really want to undo all of those teachings?”
They glare at each other for a few moments, Gregory trying to hide a twitching smile. Eventually, Eloise sits back down with the loudest sigh she can muster, plopping back down and gesturing for him to go on.
“What about Beth?” she asks.
“Is there any chapter about her being sad? That Jo leaves?”
Eloise thinks about it, but she cannot recall a specific passage. If she’s being honest, it has been a hot second since she read Little Women. Maybe since she read any book for fun. She has been preparing for college through AP tests, so first, she had to study all the literary classics from way back when.
And she wanted to interview well, so she studied up on all the big authors. She has read a shocking amount of Russians this year; her Goodreads reading challenge will be a little unhinged. Less unhinged than Penelope, who always manages to tap into the hundreds, but still.
“I don’t know,” Eloise says at last.
“I wish I had a copy,” Gregory says without skipping a beat.
She gives him a long look. “You know, there was a more subtle way to deliver that.”
“There was,” Gregory says. He smiles before biting his cheek, tamping it back down. “That’s why I didn’t come in here talking about Jo.”
“You talked about Beth because—”
“Because you’re clearly the Jo of the family,” he says with an eye roll. “So, if I came in talking about Jo, you’d realize how I’m projecting right now. If I talk about Beth, you’d read me a chapter or two of Little Women while I fix your clothes.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my clothes,” Eloise tells him.
But she has gotten up, and she’s scanning through the shelves for her worn copy of Little Women.
July 3rd, 2017
“So, you and Penn are still fighting.”
Eloise doesn’t bother looking up from her work. She keeps her elbow in the crook of the book as she glides through the best literary analysis of her life. While her professor told her she could take the summer off, she insisted on taking another English class. Soon, Eloise will need to be preoccupied with law classes.
She can study eighteenth century literature a little longer.
“Eloise?”
“I don’t know who ‘Penn’ is,” she says, stiffly.
Gregory snorts, still lingering in the doorway. “Sorry. I didn’t realize we were using her full government name. You’re still fighting with Penelope Featherington, then.”
“You wouldn’t get it,” Eloise says.
She thinks that is one of the worst parts of the fight (although most aspects of the fight suck more than she thought they would). Lady Whistledown embarrassed her in front of everyone she knew. Hell, Lady Whistledown humiliated the family a few times; she chided Daphne when she romanced Simon. Lady Whistledown ripped into Anthony while he dated Edwina, then Kate.
Lady Whistledown practically ruined Marina when she revealed the whole plot with Colin.
And this year, Eloise almost lost her internship with the governor, Charlotte, because she suspected Eloise of being Lady Whistledown.
So, yeah, Eloise is angry.
But she is not angry enough to throw Penelope to the wolves. If she revealed Penelope’s secret to even one of her siblings, she knew it would get out. Eloise cannot even risk telling Francesca, who tends to be able to keep her mouth shut.
Gregory?
She could never tell him.
“I thought you were going to kill her today,” Gregory says idly. He enters Anthony’s office then—okay, sue her, she chose to steal it from him when he went and bought a house with Kate—and plops down on the couch.
Eloise gives him a long look. “It was not—”
“It wasn’t subtle at all,” he says, cutting her off. “Like, if you thought you were being subtle, then we need to take away your degree.”
“I don’t have a degree yet,” she tells him.
He grins. “Oh, thank God.”
“Did you come in here just to bother me,” she says tightly, “or did you have a reason?”
“Well, mostly just to annoy you,” he says. “It’s one of my best qualities.”
“And who told you that?”
“Myself.” He pats his chest. “I believe in self-reflection.”
“Do you?”
With a shrug, Gregory twists to lay down on the couch. Then, from what seems to be out of nowhere, he summons a book. He makes a big show of opening it and cracking its spine (why he wants to destroy everything he touches is beyond Eloise).
Then, he starts reading it.
“‘This book is largely concerned with Hob—’”
“What are you doing?” Eloise says, cutting him off.
Gregory lowers the book and gives her his best doe eyes. “I’m reading?”
“I’m trying to work right now?”
“I think you’re trying to assassinate your keyboard,” he says. “You’ve been pounding away on those keys.”
“Maybe I’m passionate,” Eloise says.
He nods. Then, he goes back to his book. “‘This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages, a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.’”
“Are you planning on reading the whole book out loud? I don’t know if there are enough hours in the day for that,” she complains.
Gregory shrugs.
“You don’t even like Lord of the Rings,” she says.
He gasps. “What are you talking about? I love the Hobbits! Bilbo is, like, my guy!”
“You couldn’t sit through the movie last time. And that’s not the book with Bilbo.”
“Uh, he’s in it.” Then, he offers her a boyish smile, reminding her that he’s only sixteen despite him being annoying-brother-shaped. “‘Sides, you like Lord of the Rings better than the Hobbit. So, I thought…”
“You’re reading this for me,” she says, disbelieving.
He nods. “I thought you might want to take your mind off things, and usually…”
For a second, she doesn’t know what to say.
Nobody else checked in on her after she retreated to her room. She knows everyone assumes she must be in the wrong with Penelope. After all, Penelope is shy and sweet, and Eloise has always been the brash one, unafraid of saying her opinion. It doesn’t help that Penelope looks at Eloise like a kicked dog.
Eloise has the right to be mad about this.
She sighs and closes her laptop. “Okay, budge over.”
Gregory cheers quietly, but he draws his knees to his chest, allowing her to sit down next to him.
August 1st, 2021
Gareth opens the door and visibly lets out a sigh of relief. He looks ragged, his hair mussed and oily, his shirt missing a button toward the top like he pulled on the first thing he saw. He twists and glances into their apartment. “Greg, your sister’s here!”
“Tell her to go away,” comes his muffled response.
Gareth gives Eloise a sympathetic look. “He doesn’t really mean that.”
“I know my brother,” Eloise says, giving him a sharp look. It’s not that she doesn’t like Gareth; it’s just that she thinks Gareth needs to care a little more. And apply himself. And not squander his potential.
Oh, God, she’s becoming Anthony.
“Can I come in?” she asks after a moment.
Gareth looks almost embarrassed as he steps aside.
Good. She likes the idea that she has become the most intimidating woman in the family. After all, Eloise spent the last seven years at Stanford, learning law and getting ready to practice it at her father’s firm. She joined the staff only recently; she only moved back to Chicago over the summer.
Gareth hasn’t known her long enough to not feel intimidated. Eloise is a whole-ass lawyer now!
Still, the issue right now is not terrifying a teenage boy. Instead, she ducks deeper into the apartment—which is a mess; really, Gregory, she expected better than this—and finds him in his room.
The moment the light ripples across the floor, falling on the blanket mound, she hears him sigh. “Go away.”
“I don’t think I will,” Eloise says brightly. She goes over to his curtains and yanks them open, flooding the room with light. The plants clustered on his windowsill stare back at her, still green although looking a little neglected.
When Gregory doesn’t say anything, Eloise surveys the rest of his room. An uneaten lunch sits on his desk, which seems to be made of a sad sandwich and an unopened bag of chips. A mound of clothes sit in front of his laundry hamper like it couldn’t quite make it.
Then, she sits down on the edge of his bed. “We don’t have to talk about—”
“Why did she say yes?” Gregory asks. He scoots up, letting the blankets fall down around her, and he genuinely seems to be asking her. “I thought… I was just standing there, and I kept thinking she’s going to say no. Why would she say yes? She’s happy with me. She loves—”
His voice breaks, and he buries his face in his hands.
“Oh, Greg—”
“They don’t love each other,” Gregory says into his hands.
When the Bridgerton group chat started lighting up, she hadn’t expected Gregory to be the one in crisis.
Then, she didn’t expect Hyacinth’s explanation of what happened.
Gregory had been dating Lucy for the past two months, but, apparently, a boy named Haselby had proposed to her at Navy Pier. She said yes.
In front of Gregory.
Who was blindsided.
‘I will murder her,’ Hyacinth had vowed to Eloise, to every Bridgerton except Gregory. ‘I will murder her and hide her body, and nobody will ever know what happened.’
‘do u know why?’ Benedict had asked.
‘Does it matter?’ Hyacinth responded.
Looking at Gregory, Eloise thinks it matters. A lot.
“She said she won’t talk to me,” Gregory continues, miserably, “unless I ‘drop this conversation.’”
“That’s unfair,” Eloise says plainly. “Actually, that’s fucked up.”
“She said she made her choice,” Gregory says.
“That’s more fucked up.”
“She still wants to be friends.”
“Do you?” Eloise asks.
Because, look, Eloise has gotten a little more level-headed with age. A younger Eloise would have offered to go egging Lucy’s house with a younger Gregory. A younger Eloise would have told him to write her out of his life.
This Eloise has fought with Penelope and then became best friends with her again.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t… I don’t know if I can just ignore her forever.”
And Eloise knows Gregory is softer than her. She admires him for that, the way he can wear his heart on his sleeve. She has never been like that; she has always had at least one wall up at all times.
“You don’t have to know that yet,” she says in the end.
“But—”
“But nothing,” Eloise says definitively. She pulls out her phone and opens her library app. “Anyway, I downloaded some sappy romance novels on the drive here.”
“Some sappy romances?” he asks, suspiciously.
She shows him the cover where a ranch hand sits atop a horse with his shirt unbuttoned. “I thought it might cheer you up. But we don’t have to do a romance.”
“Do a romance in the regency era,” he says a little too fast, and she does wonder what exactly Gregory reads for fun. “It always works out back then.”
“I feel like they had a lot of obstacles back then,” she says, opening Google to type in Good Regency Novels. Great, there goes the algorithm.
“It always works out,” he says, and she can hear his voice break at the end. “At least back then, it always works out.”
January 4th, 2024
“Eloise,” Phillippa murmurs to her, rousing her from the half-sleep she settled into. “I have something you need to see.”
“If it’s snowing again,” Eloise says without opening her eyes, “I do not care.”
“Wow,” Phillippa says. “I’m glad Amanda and Oliver are already in bed.”
“I have seen snow before. You have seen snow before. They have seen snow before. I don’t know why we’re all so bewitched by it.”
“They haven’t seen snow from this castle.”
Eloise snorts. “It is a castle, isn’t it?”
Daphne—and, supposedly, Simon, although Eloise finds that part hard to believe—insisted they hadn’t spent enough time together as a family lately, and she rented what amounted to a castle in the mountains. It was the entire lodge to accommodate everyone in the family. Three generations of Bridgertons squeezed in, and even now, it felt like there was barely any space to breathe.
And so many screaming children.
“What do you need me to see?” she asks, stretching out and rising to her feet.
Phillippa offers her arm gallantly. Eloise imagines she does it by accident—Phillippa is not big of trying to be a storybook princess—but Eloise still grins as she slips her arm into hers and lets Phillippa escort her down the hallway.
When they reach the end of the hallway where their two rooms reside, she can hear the murmur of a deep voice.
“Shh, shh,” Gregory whispers to who she imagines must be Amanda and Oliver. “You don’t want to wake anyone up.”
“I’m tired of the baby stories,” Amanda declares. “I don’t care about princesses.”
“Yeah,” Oliver agrees. “They’re gross and boring.”
“Well, I love these stories,” Gregory declares with no real heat in his voice. “Does that make me a baby?”
“Yes,” Amanda says without skipping a beat.
Gregory gasps.
Then, there is a murmur, and Eloise tries to suppress her giggle when she hears Oliver shove Amanda. “You made him cry.”
“So, he’s a crybaby!” Amanda says, but her confidence wanes immediately after. “Uh, right? Greg—”
Then, she shrieks.
And that gets Eloise peeking inside the room where Gregory has scooped Amanda up and started racing around the room with his arms tight around her. Amanda squeals with delight, and Oliver clambers on the bed, ready to pounce on Eloise’s younger brother to get his turn.
Before he can, though, Gregory plops Amanda down and tugs Oliver up on his own accord. That gets Oliver laughing, so bright and so happy it almost makes Eloise tear up.
After an absurdly long time picking the children up and swinging them around, he drops them back on the bottom bunk and gives them a devious look. “So… I think you do like fairy tales.”
“Why?” Amanda demands.
“Because that,” he says, waving a hand around, “was what it feels like to ride a dragon.”
“None of the princesses ride dragons,” Oliver tells him.
Gregory grins. “Are you sure?”
Neither of the kids say anything. Instead, they exchange eye contact, a little wide-eyed, and Gregory grins even harder.
Then, he pulls a book out of his backpack, and that one gets Eloise to gasp, softly.
“You see,” Gregory says, “El and I made a few changes to these fairy tales when I was growing up. She didn’t like the classic princess stories, either. She wanted the princesses to have swords and dragons and flamethrowers.”
“Flamethrowers?” Oliver asks, eagerly.
Phillippa squeezes Eloise’s arm and mouths, ‘flamethrowers.’
Eloise wipes away a tear instead of responding.
“Look at this,” Gregory says, opening to the first page.
Amanda gasps. “Did she write that when she was our age?”
“Oh no. El signed that when she was tiny. You can tell because,” and here, he flips another page, “she signed for me, too. Because I was too small to hold a pencil, which, honestly, I think is unfair because I would have loved to sign my name.”
“This book is ancient,” Oliver says in awe.
Gregory laughs. “Hey. I’m only twenty-two, so it can’t be that old.”
“Ancient,” Oliver repeats.
“So old,” Amanda agrees.
Gregory pretends to think about it.
Then, he sighs and collapses against them, getting them both to giggle. “Probably. Maybe you’ll have to read the stories to me—”
“No!” Oliver whines. “You have to do it!”
Gregory grabs the book and opens it to the first page. “Fine. If I have to.”
Eloise watches him start reading.
Then, she squeezes Phillippa’s arm. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Phillippa murmurs. “Gregory told me he had to do this for you.”