Yes. We did, Julia thought, glancing at the bulging folder currently held together by two bulldog clips and Vic’s personality. But she didn’t say it aloud. She was driving, and commentating on her wife’s micromanaging while navigating Scottish A-roads was multitasking even she didn’t trust herself with.
The roads were mostly clear so far, just a thin dusting at the verges where the fields faded into scrub. Patches of old snow clung to the hillside in streaks, like someone had half-heartedly iced the landscape and given up.
Julia loved this drive.
She didn’t always love what usually awaited her at the other end—formal clothing, stiff dining room conversations, subtle games of influence around the fireside—but Balmoral itself, the journey there, had grown on her overthe years. She liked the way the land opened out, the way London slowly fell away in the rear-view mirror. She liked the slower pace, the blunt pragmatism of people who had more immediate concerns than political manoeuvring.
And this time, for the first time, they weren’t arriving as part of a formal entourage, but as family.
That thought still startled her sometimes. Not the family part—she’d been co-parenting long before there was a word on paperwork to describe what she was to Vic and Hyz—but the way it fitted here, into all this history. Into all this stone.
She’d started off as Alex’s advisor. She’d shepherded her through some of the biggest challenges and worst days of her life. She’d never imagined that one day she’d be driving up to Balmoral as Vic’s wife with their five-year-old in the back, arguing with her about reindeer.
“What if the reindeer get cold?” Vic asked suddenly, as if plucking the thought from some private stream of anxiety. “Do reindeer get cold? They must, right? That’s how mammals work. What if they don’t like the courtyard? What if the triplets are scared? What if one of them charges Erin and she takes it as a personal attack and ends up in a fistfight with Dasher?”
Julia snorted. “Erin is not going to punch a reindeer,” she said.
“You don’t know that,” Vic said darkly. “She has a lot of repressed tension.”
“Even if Erin did attempt to neutralise the reindeer,” Julia said, “I’m fairly sure Alex would talk her down.”
“Okay, that’s true,” Vic conceded, letting herself relax back against the seat for all of three seconds. “But what if?—”
“Victoria,” Julia said mildly.
“Uh-oh,” Hyz said in the back. “Full name.”
Vic wilted. “Yes?”
“Take a breath,” Julia said. “You’ve listed thirty-two potential calamities between Dalkeith and here. At this rate, by the time we reach Pitlochry, you’ll be worrying about alien abduction and plagues of frogs.”
“Pitlochry,” Hyz repeated, tasting the word. “That sounds like somewhere hobbits would go on holiday.”
“Hobbits like second breakfast,” Vic muttered. “Do we have enough snacks? Did we?—”
“We have enough snacks to feed a medium-sized army,” Julia said. “And we’re stopping in Pitlochry for lunch, remember? It’s literally on the schedule.”
Vic perked up. “You read the schedule?”
“I read the parts relevant to not starving,” Julia said. “The ten-page section on fairy light distribution patterns, I skimmed.”
Vic clutched at her heart. “Betrayal.”
She’d been like this for weeks, Julia reflected. Buzzing. Overstimulated. Pouring every spare second into the to-do list that had begun as a sensible, concise document and had mutated into a digital Kraken.
On good days, it was endearing. Watching Vic run on coffee and spreadsheets and raw enthusiasm, drawing up secret Santa lists like a general planning a campaign, was one of Julia’s quiet pleasures.
On bad days… Julia saw the cracks.
The way Vic’s eyes slipped past the present moment toward the next problem. The way her jaw clenched when something small went wrong. The way most of her jokes about messing things up were only half jokes.
It wasn’t that Vic had never cared about Christmas before. She had. They all had, in their own ways. But therewas an extra layer to it this year, an almost brittle determination.
“We’re giving them the Christmas we didn’t get,” she’d said one night, pacing their kitchen while Julia leaned against the counter and watched the tea go cold.
And that, Julia understood.
Her own childhood Christmases had been a mixture of obligation and avoidance. A duty rota shuffled between relatives, a tree that appeared and disappeared as if by magic, presents selected by secretaries from acceptable lists. The first time she’d had a Christmas that felt like it belonged to her, she’d been in her thirties, in a tiny flat with old university friends with a cheap fake tree and a handful of friends who’d had nowhere else to go. They’d eaten instant noodles with turkey-flavoured crisps and laughed too loudly and she’d gone to bed that night feeling something uncoil in her chest.
