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.
