Chapter 14
Fourteen
Lauren was at King’s Cross station early on Wednesday morning, even though she wasn’t looking forward to the trip at all,
even though she only slept in thirty-minute bursts the night before, tossing and turning with anxiety.
She was double-checking the itinerary when James came over to her, holding out his hand. “Fine,” he said, looking annoyed.
“I’ll do it.”
Lauren glanced up, a little confused. James had never offered to do anything for her. “Do what?”
He gestured across the station to the famous Platform 9? sign and the luggage cart halfway embedded in the brick wall below
it. “Take your photo,” James said. “You’ve been staring at it for the past ten minutes.”
Lauren just sighed. “Twelve-year-old me would have said yes in a heartbeat but I can’t support that anymore,” she said. “But
wait! You can take one here!” She gestured toward the station’s arched ceiling and a train pulling in at the platform behind
her. “To commemorate my first away day.”
James looked even less thrilled by this option. “We’re not even getting on that train. Violet can take it for you when she’s back.”
“Violet’s still in line at Starbucks.” Lauren handed him her phone, then took a few steps back and fluffed her hair a bit.
“Take it on zero-point-five so you can see the ceiling,” she said. “Wait, why are you holding the phone like that? Turn it
to portrait.”
James lowered the phone just long enough to glare at her.
“What! Landscape doesn’t post well.” Lauren straightened the collar on her coat, then tilted her head to the side and smiled.
James lowered the phone again. “I already took it. That’s enough.”
“C’mon, James, one more. This is my tourist era.”
“The word ‘tourist’ implies that you’ll be leaving soon, so fine.”
Violet and Harriet rejoined them, and the group headed toward the train track. Despite the early start, the others all seemed
raring to begin the journey up north, but Lauren had a sinking feeling in her stomach she couldn’t quite shake off.
She had been up most of the night before thinking about her fight with Joy, just as she had done for the past several nights.
They weren’t speaking to each other, their frostiness evident in the hallways as they passed each other and as they sat at
opposite ends of the conference table. Even Violet had looked up from her phone long enough to glance between them, one eyebrow
raised and the other frowning down as she tried to suss out the situation.
Lauren knew she had to apologize. Joy was a great friend, always looking out for her. She was the friend Lauren wanted to
emulate, but now that the ball was in her court to fix what she had broken, Lauren found herself unable to do just that. The
last time she had lost a friendship, she had lost her relationship as well, and her job, and now she was too paralyzed by
shame and uncertainty to make amends with the one person who mattered most to her.
The train whistle blew, and Lauren jumped, shattering her reverie.
On board in the first-class car, Lauren and James sat in their reserved seats in front of a table, while Harriet and Violet
sat on the other side of it, facing them. “Prince Alexander, God rest his soul,” Harriet was saying, oblivious to the fact
that Violet had her AirPods firmly jammed into her ears and was only hearing the playlist she had made, not Harriet’s wistful
speech. “He often traveled to his estate in Pembrokeshire and would invite the entire team to join him for a weekend at the
start of the summer break. We would take the royal train there most times, as he always got carsick, ever since he was a young
boy . . .”
James caught Lauren’s eye and very gently shook his head. “Do not engage,” he quietly whispered, pulling on his own headphones,
which were large and bulky and made his head look slightly like a garbanzo bean. “Unless you want four hours of personal royal
trivia.”
Lauren most definitely had zero plans to engage, so she quickly put in her own AirPods, her go-to 2010s playlist at the ready.
James had settled back into his seat and closed his eyes, but Lauren knew there was no way she was sleeping on this train,
even after waking up at 4:00 a.m. to triple-check her bag and confirm that she had packed not one but two power banks. She
had learned that from her past travels escorting press on Air Force One. (She also missed the unlimited personalized boxes of presidential M&M’s on board the plane, which felt like an especially
sharp dig now that she was hurtling into the English countryside on an understaffed train with no snack cart in sight.)
Lauren always felt unmoored on trains, like home could have been any one of the towns that they passed through, like she could have had any sort of life.
At first the skyline was still dark before fading into dusky pink and then light blue, the surroundings brown and gray matching the train tracks on the ground.
But once they went through a series of tunnels, they emerged into a small town, green grass racing alongside the train as it sped through, and Lauren found herself feeling oddly sentimental for a place she had never seen before, much less visited.
They flew through town centers and places with names that felt made up before they quickly faded back into rolling hills and wide-open fields dotted with bare trees.
At one point, they passed the back of a long row of redbrick houses and Lauren peeked into their gardens before catching sight of a young woman hoisting up a toddler who waved gleefully at the passing train.
Lauren waved back, even though she knew the child could not have seen her.
Any sort of life.
The pregnancy scare with Brian had been just that, a scare, but Lauren still had a hard time understanding what exactly had
been the scary part. Had it been her late period, Lauren visiting the bathroom twelve times a day, holding her breath each
time and feeling her anxiety rise up a bit more every time the trip revealed nothing? Had it been the realization that she
could be a parent, could be responsible for another life, another tiny human, when she rarely came home from work before ten
at night and mostly used her refrigerator to store her leftover takeout and her expensive night cream?
Or was it thinking that what she had with Brian could be permanent, that they would officially be tied together in a way that couldn’t be severed?
Eventually she started her period a week later in a staff bathroom at the White House, crying for reasons that she still didn’t understand, Brian twenty feet away and none the wiser.
She never told him. There was nothing to tell.
And probably for the best, considering that six months later she found out about him and her best friend and all her worlds, real and imagined, crumbled around her, the rubble unable to support her, much less an imagined baby.
It had been a relief, she told herself now, and turned away from the window so she could go over the op note again, double-checking
the names of the people Jasper would meet that day. There was a set that was shared with members of the press and a more detailed
document for the team that had short bios for every person they would be interacting with that day. Everything had been planned
to the tiniest detail.
They changed trains in Leeds, their little group huddled together on the (non-magical, non-Hogwarts-bound) platform, Harriet
telling a lengthy story about the day some now-dead earl (Lauren widened her eyes at James, who pretended not to notice) had
struggled to cut a ceremonial ribbon on an engagement due to blunt scissors and how she saved the day with a small sewing
kit she had kept in her purse, the rest of them either listening out of politeness or pretending not to hear her at all. Violet
tapped away at her phone the entire time like she was covering breaking news, her thumbs flying, though when Lauren checked
the official royal channels, she saw no new social updates. But then she saw the little smirk that only came when you were
sharing something private with another person, and Lauren felt a pain in her chest as she once again thought of her argument
with Joy.
Four hours after their departure, their train finally rolled into Skipton, a town that seemed to be entirely made out of stone walls and cobblestones.
There were several people standing on the platform, and Lauren could see their cloudy breath come out in puffs in the near-freezing morning air.
It was much colder here than in London. She wrapped her scarf around her neck a little tighter, wishing she had remembered her hat.
“I don’t think I’ve been in Skipton since Thatcher was in office,” Harriet said brightly as she nearly stumbled into Lauren.
“Oops, sorry, dear.” She glanced around the train platform. “It hasn’t changed a bit.” She stumbled into Lauren again, and
when Lauren turned around to figure out why exactly Harriet seemed to not understand the concept of personal space, she realized
that Harriet was grinning and pointing toward something.
Or, as it turned out, someone: Oscar walking toward her, two coffee cups in hand.
“Morning,” he said.
“Hi,” she said. “Um, hello. Were you on the train with us?”
“Of course. Though at the back with the commoners. We don’t get first class on expenses at the Tribune,” he said. “Got you this.”
He held out the cup to her, which was smaller than the other one. “Double espresso,” he said. “You ordered it at the restaurant
back when you tried to kill me with the seafood tower.”
Lauren froze. “Wait, you were only kidding about the shellfish allergy, right? Right?”
Oscar smirked a little. “You’ll find out one day,” he replied as she took the cup from him. “See you at the pen.”
It took Lauren a couple of seconds to figure out that the pen was the press pen at the “fixed point press position” detailed