“It’s when you think you’re so brilliant,” explained Lauren, “that you fuck up horrendously and then the gods punish you.”

“I’m sorry.” Rosaline scrambled out of the car, feeling like a terrible person. “I love you both, and you’re being really encouraging and lovely and stuff, but I’ve got to run. You”—she pointed at Lauren—“don’t start teaching my daughter Catullus. And you”—she glanced at Amelie—“I’m going to miss you, but be good for Grandma Cordelia and don’t take advantage of Auntie Lauren because I know what you’re like when she’s babysitting.”

“You shouldn’t call it babysitting,” Amelie protested, “because I’m not a baby. I’m a child. Then I’ll be a tween. Then a teen. Then a grown-up. Then I’ll be old. And then I’ll be dead.”

Lauren laughed. “Hardly seems worth the effort, does it?”

It was not an auspicious note on which to start Lauren’s custody of an impressionable young mind. But there wasn’t time to address it now. Flinging her bag over her shoulder, and wishing she’d been able to finish that last fucking practice cake, Rosaline plunged into the rush-hour crowds.

The train was not, as it turned out, six minutes late. It wasn’t even four minutes late, which meant Rosaline had exactly enough time to watch it pulling out of the station without her. Rationally, she knew that Miss Wooding hadn’t intentionally timed her casual biphobia to have the largest and most negative impact possible on Rosaline’s life, but fuck if it didn’t feel that way. Having trudged all the way back over the footbridge to the information desk, she then spent an unhelpfully long time extracting from a bored station employee the precise combination of trains, short walks, and replacement bus services that would allegedly get her to Patchley House where the show was being filmed.

The first leg—by train to the middle of nowhere—was at least relatively short. The second—by juddering coach to a subtly different middle of nowhere—took rather longer. Then came the third—and theoretically final—stage of the journey, which was on one of those incredibly slow trains that should probably have been retired in the 1970s and stopped at every tiny station in every tiny village between Upper Whereinthehell and Who-Cares-on-the-Wold. Rosaline’s original plan had been to use the journey to relax and centre herself or ground herself or do whatever you were supposed to do to get into the right headspace to come across well on reality TV. Instead of, say, the headspace of a stressed-out single mum whose parents—to whom she owed a nontrivial sum of money—would not have been at all surprised to learn she’d failed to get on a train properly.

Then the train stopped.

And didn’t start again for forty fucking minutes.

“Uh”—the antiquated speaker system crackled into life—“hello. This is your driver speaking. And this is an announcement for all passengers on the eighteen twenty-three service from Mopley-on-Pond to Tapworth. Owing to a fault, this train will now terminate at Fondle Backwater.”

That did not bode well. Bodewise, things were honestly looking pretty rough. And they looked, if anything, rougher, as the train heaved itself alongside the mid-length slab of concrete that passed for Fondle Backwater station. Not sure what else to do, Rosaline grabbed her bag and disembarked. There was only one other passenger disembarking with her. A man, who—in skinny chinos and a blue shirt casually rolled up at the elbows—looked worryingly like he might have had actual style. He also definitely didn’t belong here. But, unlike Rosaline, he seemed to be okay with that, surveying the surroundings with an air of composure rather than confusion-trending-towards-panic.

What he could possibly be surveying Rosaline wasn’t certain, because the view consisted of sky, fields, and eight sheep, one of whom was regarding her with an expression she chose to read as pity.

“So I’m guessing,” remarked the stranger, who’d walked over while Rosaline was busy being judged by livestock, “that Fondle Backwater wasn’t your intended destination?”

Now that he was closer, Rosaline was having to contend with the fact that, as well as stylish, he was also disconcertingly good-looking. In that tall, cheekbony slightly haughty English way that would get you the male lead in a BBC costume drama about a rakish aristocrat who has a tumultuous affair with a coal miner’s daughter.

And appears shirtless on a horse at least once a season.

Typical. The first time an attractive person of any gender had spoken to her in months and she felt very much like someone who’d spent their day failing to finish a cake, fighting with a primary school teacher, and being dragged all over the southeast by a barely functional railway company. Quick, Rosaline, be charming. “What do you mean? I woke up this morning and I thought, You know what I want? An evening at a train station with a mildly suggestive name.”

“Ah, then you should have gone to Much-Tupping-in-the-Weir.” He offered an easy smile, brackets forming at the corners of his generous mouth. “It’s even milder.”

“I hear Lower Bumgrope is nice this time of year.”

“Which is ironic, because Upper Bumgrope is an absolute dump.”

Rosaline laughed, partly amused, but partly just relieved. Because, in retrospect, bumgrope had been a risky gambit, especially as the second thing you said to someone.

“But seriously,” he went on, “as much as I’d love to stay here, exchanging rural innuendos with a delightful stranger, I need to be in Tapworth”—he paused to check an imaginary watch—“about an hour ago.”

There was, as far as Rosaline was concerned, only one reason to go to Tapworth. Well, unless you lived there, but then you probably wouldn’t get lost a couple of miles down the road. Which meant that she was fraternising with the competition. The well-spoken, well-dressed, well . . . well competition. “What a coincidence. I also need to be in Tapworth an hour ago.”

“Ah. Contestant or crew?”

“If I was crew,” she asked, “wouldn’t I know what I was doing?”

“You could be new.” Another smile. This one with the faintest edge of wickedness. “Or horrible at your job.”

“You got me. I’m a key grip, but I don’t know how to grip anything.”

He twitched an eyebrow at her. “That must cause a variety of problems.”