Chapter 11
VIC
Victoria Grey-Hughes-Wilding, keeper of spreadsheets, conqueror of logistics, tamer of royal chaos, stood in the middle of the kitchen with pumpkin guts sliding slowly down her jumper and thought:
This is it.
This is how I die.
Not in a blaze of glory, not on a dramatic horseback accident, not even buried under a landslide of paperwork. No. She was going to expire, right here, in front of the Queen, from sheer mortification while smelling faintly of decomposing pumpkin.
Around her, everything existed in horrid slow motion.
The collapsed “festive pumpkin centrepiece” lay in ruin on the flagstones, a sad ring of orange mush and decorative pinecones.
The dogs were sniffing at it with the curious reverence of archeologists at a dig.
The children were watching her with wide eyes.
Erin was definitely, definitely trying not to laugh.
Alex had a hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking.
And Julia was just looking at her with that maddening mix of fondness and exasperation that always made Vic want to both hide and kiss her at the same time.
“I can fix this,” Vic heard herself say, voice oddly high. “It’s fine. It’s… it’s fine. It’s just a centrepiece. We’ll improvise. We’ll improvise a new symbol of seasonal joy from, I don’t know, potatoes and despair.”
“Victoria,” Julia said gently.
“And anyway,” Vic continued, because momentum seemed safer than silence, “it’s not like anything else has gone wrong today. Just the turkeys being stuck in Narnia, the caterers snowed in, the power auditioning for a horror film, the dogs eating the Yule log—”
“Only half of it,” Mrs. MacLeod muttered.
“—the tree collapsing like a Victorian melodrama,” Vic went on, “and now my centrepiece has literally disintegrated in my hands like the fragile illusion of control it was, which is FINE, THIS IS FINE—”
“Victoria,” Julia repeated, firmer this time.
Vic snapped her mouth shut.
The room swam slightly. Her heart was racing. There was a thud in her ears that might have been her pulse or might have been the distant rhythm of her own impending breakdown.
“Right,” she said briskly. “I’m just going to… go and draft a revised contingency schedule for the evening. Version seventy-six. Possibly seventy-seven. It’s important to iterate.”
She tried to step around the pumpkin wreckage with dignity. Her foot slid on a stringy seed slick. She windmilled her arms, dignity going down with her centrepiece.
Julia caught her elbow before she could face-plant in the Yule log crumbs.
“That’s enough,” Julia murmured into her ear. “Come with me.”
“I have to—”
“You have to come with me,” Julia said, with the implacable tone she used on stubborn officials and toddlers.
Vic, who had negotiated with foreign dignitaries and stone-faced security teams, and Queen Alexandra herself, let herself be steered out of the kitchen without another word.
She heard the noise resume behind her as they left — kids talking, dogs woofing, Alex’s low laugh, Erin’s steady voice. The door swung shut and muffled it all to a distant buzz.
The corridor was cooler, quieter. Lanterns flickered in old brass sconces. The stone under Vic’s boots felt wonderfully solid, unlike the traitorous pumpkin.
Julia kept a hand around her elbow all the way down the passage to a small sitting room on the corner of the castle. It was one of the less formal ones — the one Alex preferred when they were here, full of worn armchairs and old rugs and a slightly crooked painting of a stag on the far wall.
Julia nudged the door open with her hip, guided Vic inside, and closed it firmly behind them.
The quiet settled like a blanket.
No children. No dogs. No staff. No schedule.
Just the crackle of the fire and the faint howl of the wind outside.
Vic took one look at the room and burst into tears.
“Hey,” Julia said immediately, softening, stepping in close. “No, love. Come here.”
“I’m fine,” Vic choked, even as the tears kept rolling, hot and humiliating. “Everything’s fine.”
“Yes,” Julia said, folding her into her arms. “You’re clearly the picture of serenity.”
Vic laughed, a wet, hiccuping sound. “Don’t mock my process.”
Julia didn’t say anything else for a while. She just held her, strong and sure, while Vic got her breathing under control, head tucked against Julia’s shoulder like she’d done a thousand times before in a thousand different crises — none of them involving vegetables.
After a minute or two, Vic’s sobs tapered off into sniffles. Her pulse stopped pounding quite so loudly. The smell of pumpkin was still distressingly present, but Julia’s familiar perfume cut through it — warm, subtle, safe.
“Sorry,” Vic mumbled into her jumper.
“For what?” Julia asked.
“For… exploding,” Vic said, gesturing weakly in the direction of the kitchen. “For the pumpkin. For being insane about Christmas. For—” She flapped her hand helplessly. “All of it.”
Julia eased back just enough to see her face, but kept her hands resting on Vic’s waist.
“Sit,” she said gently, nodding toward the sofa by the fire.
“I’ll get pumpkin on it,” Vic protested.
“Good,” Julia said. “It’ll match the red wine stain from the time you tried to open a bottle with a shoe.”
“That was one time,” Vic muttered.
“And it was hilarious,” Julia said.
She tugged Vic toward the sofa. They sat, shoulders touching, knees angled toward each other. Vic stared into the fire as if it might offer her a revised timetable.
“I had it all planned,” she said after a moment, her voice small and hoarse. “Every detail. The timings. The food. The lights. The stupid centrepiece. I had a document, Jules.”
“I know you did,” Julia said. “You made me proofread it at midnight.”
“It was going to be perfect,” Vic whispered. “Our first proper Christmas all together with no drama overshadowing it. I wanted it to be—” She broke off, throat tightening again.
Julia’s expression softened into something heartbreaking. “You wanted it to make up for all the ones you never had.”
The words hit like a gentle, accurate arrow.
Vic blinked hard. “That’s… that’s not—”
“My love,” Julia said quietly. “You don’t have to spin this. Not with me.”
Vic swallowed.
The fire popped, sending up a small flare of sparks.
She looked down at her hands. There was dried pumpkin on her sleeves. A smear of icing she hadn’t noticed earlier. The faint indentation of where her fingers had curled around her clipboard all day like a lifeline.
“Christmas was… not good,” she said eventually, each word cautious, like stepping onto thin ice. “When I was a kid.”
“I know,” Julia said.
“No, you know in the abstract,” Vic said. “Because I’ve made jokes about it. ‘Ha ha, my parents once gave me an iron as a present,’ that sort of thing. But I’ve never…” She trailed off.
Julia didn’t speak. Just waited, patient, her fingers tracing idle circles on Vic’s knee.
“It wasn’t just the gifts,” Vic said, her voice low.
“It was… everything. The shouting. The money worries. The drinking. Every year. Every single year. Either we had nothing and the whole big house felt… empty and cold… or when things got a bit better he went the other way and tried to make a show of it. Flashy presents we couldn’t afford, food for ten people when there were three of us, and then a screaming match in the kitchen about the credit card bill- trying to keep up with the very wealthy families. ”
Julia’s hand stilled.
“We had one tree,” Vic continued, staring at the flames.
“This sad massive artificial thing that lost more plastic needles every year. He’d swear at it while trying to get the lights to work.
My mum would cry in the bathroom. I’d pretend not to hear.
” She let out a shaky breath. “I used to think… if I could just get the lights untangled without anyone shouting, that would be enough.”
“Vic,” Julia whispered.
“And I swore,” Vic went on, the words coming faster now that she’d started, “I swore that one day I would have Christmas somewhere people weren’t fighting.
With food that didn’t come from a yellow sticker shelf.
With lights that worked, and a tree that didn’t look like it was dying, and people who weren’t on the verge of throwing plates at each other.
I swore it would be perfect. Like in the films.”
She made a small, helpless gesture with one hand.
“And now I’m stood in a literal castle,” she said thickly.
“With the Queen as my best friend. With my incredible wife. With a daughter who is frighteningly competent. And dogs and staff and a massive budget and a tree you could see from space. And the turkey’s gone on strike and the power’s flirting with us and my centrepiece has just imploded and I—”
Her voice cracked.
Julia moved closer, their shoulders fully pressed together now. “And you feel like you’ve failed,” she finished gently.
Vic nodded, tears spilling over again. “Just once,” she whispered. “Just once I wanted to get it right.”
Julia was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was soft and steady.
“Love. Look at me.”
Vic resisted. Julia waited. Eventually, Vic dragged her gaze away from the fire and met her wife’s eyes.
“No one here,” Julia said clearly, “wants perfect.”
Vic opened her mouth to argue. Julia touched her lips lightly with two fingers.
“No,” she said. “Listen. No one. Not Alex. Not Erin. Not the kids. Not me. We did not come up here thinking, ‘God, I hope Victoria achieves optimal festive performance metrics.’”
Vic snorted wetly despite herself. “That sounds like something you’d say in a meeting.”
“Maybe I prepared it earlier,” Julia said. “The point is — we came here because we wanted to be together. To have time. To breathe. After a hellish few years, if we’re honest.”
“It feels… selfish,” Vic said in a small voice. “After everything Alex and Erin have been through. All the public stuff. The protests. The losses. The threats. If this Christmas goes wrong, it’ll feel like we let them down.”