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“… and I’ve got you on a flight to London on Friday,” Dad was saying, and Lucy’s mouth fell open as she pressed the phone closer to her ear. “I know you’ve got school that day, but how much do they actually cover in the first week anyway, right?”
“London?” she said, her voice cracking.
“Yes, London,” Dad said impatiently, as if this were a ridiculous question. “Your mother and I are going tomorrow, and you’ll meet us there on Friday.”
Lucy was torn between the impulse to simply agree—in case they might change their minds—and the urge to ask a thousand more questions. “Uh, why…?”
“We want to see you, darling,” her mother said. “We want to be sure you’re all right.”
“I’m fine,” she said again. “I just—”
“Coming home was out of the question,” Dad said, once again businesslike. “So we’d like you to meet us there.”
Lucy felt like laughing. On the scale of worldwide emergencies, nothing could have given her a truer sense for where the blackout ranked: not urgent enough for her parents to interrupt a trip but just alarming enough for them to buy her a plane ticket.
The details were discussed and the rest of the plans arranged. Lucy would miss two days of school, but she’d be getting a cultural experience, which seemed like justification enough. She thought of her earlier trips over, once when she was five and once when she was eight. The first time had been during Christmas; they’d visited her grandmother in the stately town house where her mother had grown up, and all toured the city together: the ornate parliament buildings and the giant clock that towered over them, Oxford Street with its garlands and wreaths, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Lucy had sung carols, her voice loud and warbling beside her mother’s more melodic one.
They went again two years later, just after her grandmother had passed away, a more somber trip that was spent mostly in the living room of the old town house, nodding politely to black-clad strangers and playing cards on the floor with her brothers.
Still, she had loved it there. It was the thing that—even more than the postcards—had sparked her obsession with travel. When she was little, she’d believed the whole world—or at least all its cities—would look exactly like New York, tall and jagged and imposing. She had no other basis for comparison, and it seemed only logical that a city was a city, just as a farm was a farm, and a mountain was a mountain. But London was completely different from what she’d imagined; it was regal and charming, stately and enchanting, and she’d fallen under its spell from the moment she arrived.
So she was excited to be going back now. It wasn’t Paris and it wasn’t Cape Town. It wasn’t Sydney or Buenos Aires. And it wasn’t anywhere new.
But it was definitely Somewhere.
And there was nobody she wanted to tell more than Owen. But she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to knock on the door of the basement apartment. And as often as she’d lingered in the lobby, making small talk with the doormen, she still hadn’t run into him again.
Even now, as she waited on the curb while George tried to flag down a cab, she couldn’t help glancing back toward the lobby one last time, hoping he might appear. But there was no sign of him, and there hadn’t been in three days.
It was almost as if she’d made him up entirely.
At the airport, she sat at the gate and watched the planes taking off out the window, trying to decide whether it was nerves or excitement that was making her stomach churn. This was what she’d wanted, of course, but it wasn’t how she’d pictured it happening: being sent rather than invited, summoned rather than whisked away.
On the plane, she sank low in her seat, looking out the window while the other passengers boarded. Her thoughts drifted to Owen again, the way his eyes had flashed when he spoke about traveling the country, and she was so focused on this, so lost in the memory of him, that when someone sat down heavily beside her and she turned to find that it wasn’t him—that it was, instead, an old Englishman with red cheeks and whiskers in his nose—she was more surprised than it made sense to be.
She slept the whole way across the Atlantic, the night passing as the ocean slipped by beneath the plane, and when she woke, it was to discover that they’d caught up with the morning, the light streaming through the oval windows all up and down the length of the plane. She rubbed her eyes and squinted out at the clouds that tumbled over the city, and the fine mist of rain that clung to the plane as they landed.
There was a car waiting for her just outside the arrivals area, and she sat in the backseat and tried to keep her bleary eyes open as it glided through the rainy London streets. She realized how much she’d forgotten in the last eight years; it was half a lifetime ago that she was here, and only now did she recall the quirky details of the place: the colorful doors and the painted signs on the pubs, the roundabouts and the lampposts, the buildings that stood shoulder to shoulder along the winding streets.
The town house had long ago been sold, so her parents now stayed at the Ritz whenever they were in town. Lucy couldn’t help staring as they pulled up to the grand old building wreathed in lights, and a bellhop appeared out of nowhere to help her with her suitcase. When she told the man at the front desk that she was looking for her parents, he gave her the room number, and then pointed to the doorway behind her.
“The lift is just around the corner,” he said, and Lucy smiled all the way up to the sixth floor, wondering if there would be much difference to getting stuck in a lift instead of an elevator.
Upstairs, she knocked on the door to her parents’ room. When it opened, they were both standing there as if they’d been waiting; her mother, tall and willowy, her hair dark as Lucy’s, and her father, sandy-haired and enormous, with glasses and a haircut that made him look every inch as serious as he was. They were both generally reserved, not prone to huge amounts of affection, but before the door had even closed, Lucy found herself folded into a hug, tucked between the two of them in a way that felt so safe, so overwhelming, and most of all so surprising that she began to cry without meaning to.
“We’re so sorry,” Mom said, letting go and looking at her with concern. “If we’d known…”
“No, it’s fine,” Lucy said, wiping her eyes. “It really wasn’t a big deal. I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m just… I guess I’m just happy to see you.”
“We’re happy to see you, too,” Dad said, bringing her suitcase in from the hallway and then closing the door. “Because of—well, because of some scheduling things, we couldn’t get back. But we felt terrible that you were all alone through an ordeal like that, and we just really wanted to see you.”
Lucy felt a little dazed by all the attention. “I’m fine,” she said for what felt like the thousandth time as Mom guided her over to the bed, where they sat together on the edge, knees touching.
“So what was it like?” Dad asked as he pulled out the desk chair. Once seated, he crossed his legs and gave her a long look, the kind she’d seen him give lawyers and bankers when they’d come for di
“It was dark,” she said, and Mom laughed. “I was actually in the elevator when it happened.”
“We heard,” Dad said. “The boys told us.”
Lucy had called her brothers the very next day, first Charlie and then Ben, and she’d told them about climbing out of the elevator and walking up and down the stairwells; she’d told them about the doormen ru