He blinks at her, startled. She’s wearing a black cotton dress with a jean jacket, her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. Her red trainers are scuffed and worn, and on her back there’s a green rucksack that looks about as tall as she is.
“Hugo,” she says, though it’s not exactly a question.
After she wrote back to his second email, he sent her a photo of himself so that she’d know he wasn’t some weirdo from the internet. (Although maybe he was now? It was hard to be sure.) For a while, he’d avoided giving his surname, because he wasn’t that keen on her stumbling across the many articles about his family, not to mention his mum’s blog, a treasure trove of embarrassing anecdotes. He wanted to start this trip as Hugo Wilkinson, not as one of the Surrey Six.
But as their volley of messages continued, she pressed him on this, and he didn’t blame her. If one of his sisters was mad enough to go on a trip with a stranger she’d met on the internet, he’d want her to find out every scrap of information she could. Still, he’d been bracing himself for the kind of thunderstruck reaction he always gets when people discover he’s a sextuplet. But from Mae, there was nothing. To his relief, her next reply was just a request for the full itinerary.
Even so, he knows she must’ve done her homework on him. So it surprises him, at first, the way she’s staring, like she’s trying to decide whether or not it’s him. But then he realizes it’s not that at all. It’s more like she’s measuring something about him, and he stands up a little straighter as he waits for her verdict.
Finally, she takes a few steps toward him. “Hi.”
He smiles reflexively, still slightly flustered by the directness of her gaze. She’s a good foot shorter than him, but there’s a certainty that makes her seem anything but small.
“Hi,” he says.
“I’m Mae.” She reaches out to shake his hand. It’s an oddly formal gesture, but it sets a definite tone: they are partners in this. “Sorry I’m late.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m just so glad you made it.”
“Me too,” she says, and there’s laughter in her eyes. “Guess it’s lucky I don’t have any bunions.”
“I guess so,” he says, feeling his cheeks flush, still a little guilty about rejecting and then inviting her. “So did you drive down or take the…”
He makes a gesture toward the giant board hanging in the middle of the station, and she looks amused.
“My parents drove me.”
“Oh,” Hugo says, looking around. “Are they…?”
“No, they had to take my grandmother to her apartment. It’s sort of a long story. But we already said our goodbyes and everything.”
“Right, since you’re…”
“Going straight to school at the end of this, yeah. I’m a light packer,” she adds when she sees him glance at her bag; then she cracks a grin. “Just kidding. We shipped the rest.”
Above them, a final boarding announcement for the Lake Shore Limited comes over the loudspeakers, and Hugo hooks his thumbs beneath the straps of his rucksack.
“Well,” he says with a smile, “I suppose this is it.”
She smiles back, but there’s something steely about it, and he can almost see it then, the way this means something to her too. It isn’t simply a lark or a freebie or an adventure. It’s something bigger. And from nowhere, the thought pops into his head:This is going to be okay.
Another announcement comes over the speakers, more urgent this time, and it stirs him to action. “Ready?” he murmurs as he adjusts his pack, but when he looks up again, she’s several steps away, moving through the crowds toward the platform.
“Ready,” she says over her shoulder, but he can barely hear her.
She’s already on her way.
The minute they steponto the train, Mae feels it like a bubble in her chest: a sense of exhilaration so light and airy that she suspects she could float all the way to California.
It doesn’t matter that she lied to her dads. Or that her grandmother can’t keep a secret. It doesn’t even matter that her strategy of regarding Hugo as nothing more than a human train ticket has already been complicated by the very fact of him standing beside her.
She’d looked him up, of course. She wasn’t an idiot.
But whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t what she found: a disarmingly good-looking Brit who was biracial and extremely tall and apparently somewhat famous for being a sextuplet, of all things. As she sifted through the articles and blog posts and family photos, Mae was surprised—and a little alarmed—by how excited she was to meet him, even though she already knew what this was. She needed a ticket. And he needed a girl named Margaret Campbell. That’s all.
But now, here he is, no longer pixilated or imaginary, no longer just an email address and a crazy idea. Instead, he’s a person with an adorable accent and a kind smile, who has to bend a little to get through the door of the train as he climbs aboard.
An attendant named Ludovic leads them down a narrow hallway toward their compartment. “We only have a couple of dinner seatings still available, so I suggest you make a reservation now.” He checks his notebook. “Six-thirty or nine?”
