It’s only now occurring to him that maybe that was a sign.
“I think you should still go,” she says, and he looks up in surprise. The whole thing had been her idea. Margaret thought a train trip would be a romantic way to see America, where she’d be spending the next four years. She was the one who found the promotion online and booked the tickets, surprising Hugo for his birthday a few months back. They were meant to go from New York to California, with a few stops in between. And then Hugo would drop her off at Stanford before returning to Surrey, the place where he’d lived his whole life and was apparently never leaving.
“Why me?” he asks, staring at her. “Why not you?”
“Well, you’re the one staying behind. So I figured it might be nice for you to…” She pauses when she notices his expression, and her pale skin flushes a deep pink. “Sorry. I’m mucking this up, aren’t I?”
“No,” he says, thinking of the plans they’d been making all summer, the photos of the train, sleek and silver, moving west across America. “It’s just—how could I go without you?”
“You’re a bit hopeless sometimes, it’s true,” she says with a smile, “but I think you could probably manage to get there in one piece.”
She reaches for her bag, which is slumped on the floor near his desk, and hands him a blue folder with the name of a travel company embossed across the front. When he takes it, their fingers brush, and suddenly his head is swimming with doubts. But then she leans forward to kiss him on the cheek before standing up, and something about the gesture—the sheer friendliness of it—reminds him of why this is happening and steadies him again.
“I hope you’ll still come see me,” she says. “When you get to California.”
“Sure,” he answers without really thinking about it, and the trip starts to rearrange itself in his head: instead of sitting beside Margaret, the two of them talking softly as the train rattles through the night, it’s only him now, inching his way across a strange country alone.
Alone, he thinks, closing his eyes.
Hugo can scarcely imagine what that feels like. He shares a bedroom with Alfie and a bathroom with George and Oscar too. At the kitchen table, he’s wedged between Poppy and Isla, and when they watch TV, he’s somehow always the last to dive for a sofa, which means he usually ends up on the floor with a cushion. On rare holidays, they all pile into a cottage in Devon that belongs to a friend of Mum’s, and the farthest he’s ever been from home—the only place he’s really been at all—was Paris for a school trip, which meant all his brothers and sisters were there, too, making the weekend brighter and funnier but also more crowded, the six of them laughing and tripping along the cobblestone streets, a built-in team, a six-piece band, an entire unit of their own.
Alone, he thinks again, and his chest feels light.
He stands up to fold Margaret into a hug, his throat thick. For a long time, they hold each other, neither quite ready to let go. Then, finally, he kisses her check and says, “I love you.” She leans back to look at him and he cracks a grin. “In a way.”
“Too soon,” she says, but she’s laughing too.
When she’s gone, he sits back down on his bed. There’s a dull pounding in his ears, but otherwise he feels oddly numb. An hour ago he had a girlfriend, and now he doesn’t. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
He flips open the blue folder. There’s a note inside that says Happy Birthday, Hugo! in Margaret’s neat handwriting. He moves it aside to look at the itinerary, thinking back on all their conversations about this trip. She teased him about his long legs, promising to book an aisle seat on the flight from London, his first one ever, and he rolled his eyes when she talked about going for tea at the Plaza. “We live in England,” he’d said. “We’re already drowning in tea.”
There were nights in Chicago and Denver, and also in San Francisco, where they’d planned to stay a couple of days before Margaret needed to head down to Stanford. It’s all a bit harder to picture now, and he shuffles through the pages, trying to imagine how different the trip will be.
This is when it dawns on him that every single sheet of paper has Margaret’s name on it. He looks a little closer. The train tickets, the hotels, even the general booking from the company—all of it has Margaret Campbell printed across the top.
He glances down to the bottom of the confirmation from their hotel in Denver to see the words spelled out in bold letters: nonrefundable and nontransferable.
Hugo almost laughs.
Happy birthday to me, he thinks, and his heart falls as he realizes what this means. But just as he reaches for his mobile to call the tour company—to see if there might be any exceptions at all—the door to his room flies open and Alfie sticks his head in.
Among the six of them, there are two sets of identical twins: his sisters, Poppy and Isla, and then Hugo and Alfie, who are carbon copies of each other, right down to the flecks of green in their eyes. They have matching dimples and ears that stick out a bit, the same brown skin and black hair. At the moment, Hugo’s is longer than Alfie’s, which is cropped close to his head, but otherwise they’re almost impossible to tell apart. Except for their personalities.
“Hey, mate,” Alfie says, uncharacteristically reserved. He steps into the room and shuts the door. But instead of flopping onto his bed, he just stands there, scratching the back of his neck. “So, uh…”
“You ran into Margaret,” Hugo says with a sigh.
Alfie looks relieved. “Yeah. We did.”
“We?”
He opens the door to reveal the others out in the hall. All four of them. They file in a little sheepishly. “Sorry,” George mumbles, sinking onto the bed and giving Hugo an awkward pat on the back. George looks deeply solemn, but then he always looks solemn, as if being born first instilled in him a certain seriousness of character. “This is rubbish, isn’t it?”
“I can’t believe it,” says Isla, spinning the desk chair around and sitting backward in it, her chin resting on her forearms, her dark eyes fierce and protective. “How could she do that?”
Hugo gives them a smile, but he can feel it wobble with effort. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m fine. Really.”
Poppy is still standing near the door, absently twisting the ends of her box braids. She fixes him with a skeptical look, as if she can see straight through him. Which she usually can. “Hugo.”
“Really,” he says again. “It’ll be fine.”
There’s a long silence, in which Hugo stares at his hands to avoid watching the rest of them exchange glances. Finally, Alfie shrugs. “I never liked her much anyway,” he says, which makes Hugo laugh in spite of himself, because they all loved Margaret. If anything, they thought she was out of his league.
But still, one by one, they join in.
“Yeah,” says Oscar, who has been hovering on Alfie’s side of the room, never one for drama. He generally tends to prefer the world of his video games to the real one, but now he runs a hand over his twists, cracking a grin. “She was the worst.”
“A real monster,” Isla agrees, trying to keep a straight face.
“Remember that time she spilled her drink on you, Pop?” asks George, and for a moment, Poppy hesitates. Of all of them, she’s the closest with Margaret, and Hugo can see that she’s torn. But in the end, she nods.
“I still haven’t forgiven her for that,” she says gamely. “And now I never will.”
They carry on like that for a bit, and Hugo does his best to smile, but he’s still thinking about everything that happened and about the itinerary in his hands, and it isn’t until Alfie chimes in that the idea occurs to him and a plan begins to form.
“Don’t worry, mate,” Alfie says merrily, reaching out to give Hugo’s shoulder a little pat. “There are other Margaret Campbells out there.”