Chapter 1: Majority Vote
The door clicked shut, muffling the distant, percussive roar of the House into a dull hum. Silence, thick and sudden, pressed against Linda’s ears. She leaned back against the cool, polished wood, her fingertips whitening against the grain. The private executive washroom was a study in muted power: dove-grey marble, polished brass, the lingering ghost of expensive aftershave and, underneath it all, the tang of industrial disinfectant.
She breathed in.Out. The face in the mirror above the sink was composed, a masterpiece of disciplined calm. Deputy Prime Minister. Shadow Foreign Secretary. Linda Rickman. The tailored navy suit was armour. The single strand of pearls, a gift from Alan for their twentieth, a talisman.
Her hand, steady as stone, dipped into her leather portfolio. From between a draft treaty on agricultural subsidies and a threat assessment brief, she pulled the small, absurdly colourful box. It looked vulgar here, an interloper from a different, messier universe. The instructions were simple. Mortifyingly simple.
Her heart was a frantic, trapped bird against her ribs. It was impossible. They’d been careful. Mostly. There was that weekend in Suffolk after the conference, the fire, the single malt… But at fifty-seven? Her body had been sending whispers for weeks—a profound fatigue bone-deep enough to cut through the usual political adrenaline, a queasiness that had nothing to do with the Leader’s latest policy shift. She’d blamed stress, perimenopause, the punishing hours.
The plastic stick felt flimsy. She placed it on the edge of the marble sink and turned away, unable to watch. She stared instead at the flawless grout between the tiles, counting seconds in time with her pulse. The facade in the mirror began to fissure. A faint tremor in her jaw. A vulnerability in the eyes that no select committee had ever seen.
Three minutes. The longest of her life. Longer than any electoral count, any Cabinet reshuffle silence.
She turned.
A single, decisive blue plus sign glared up from the little window.
The world did not slow, or stop, or spin. It simply reconfigured itself, violently and irrevocably, around that tiny, plus-shaped atom bomb. All the air left the room. She gripped the sink, the marble biting into her palms, her head bowed between her stiff arms. A sound escaped her—a sharp, ragged gasp that was half laugh, half sob. Deputy Prime Minister. Shadow Foreign Secretary. Linda Rickman. Pregnant.
The absurdity was oceanic. It would be a scandal. A tabloid feast. The whispers, the condescension, the inevitable debates about her competence, her age, her priorities. ‘Can she really serve while breeding?’ The Leader’s face, a mask of disappointed calculation. The Tories’ gleeful, barking mockery. Her career, the thing she had built with her own intellect and will, brick by exhausting brick, might not survive this.
And underneath the tsunami of political dread, another feeling sparked, small and stubborn and terrifyingly bright. A wild, secret joy.
Alan.
She fumbled for her phone, her usually precise fingers clumsy. She scrolled to his name—a picture of him in his gardening clothes, scowling humorously at a rebellious rosebush. It went straight to voicemail. Of course. He was on set. The hollow, bottled sound of the Hogwarts Great Hall during filming always murdered signal.
The tone beeped. She opened her mouth, but no words came. She cleared her throat, pressing her free hand flat against her stomach. “Alan. It’s me.” Her voice was strange to her own ears, thick, stripped of its usual parliamentary cadence. “Listen, I… I’m fine. Everything’s fine. More than fine. It’s just… you need to come home. As soon as you’re wrapped. The moment they say ‘cut’. Don’t… don’t stop for anything. Don’t even change out of the full… the full costume if you don’t want to. Just get in the car and drive. I have a surprise. A big one. The kind that… reorders things. Come home, my love. Please.”
She ended the call and stared at the phone. He would hear the shake in her voice. He knew every nuance of it. He’d panic, then he’d trust, then he’d drive like a man possessed.
She looked back at the test on the marble, that bold blue plus. Then she looked at herself in the mirror again. The woman staring back was pale, her eyes wide with a volatile cocktail of terror and wonder. She carefully placed the used test back into its box and slid it into the innermost pocket of her portfolio, next to her heart.
She squared her shoulders. Adjusted the cuffs of her jacket. Smoothed a hand over the sleek, expensively cut wool that lay flat over her stomach—for now. The fear was still there, a cold knot in her gut. The joy was there too, a fragile, glowing ember.
She had a division bell to answer, a frontbench to lead, a country to scrutinize. And she had a secret, growing cell by cell, that would change everything.
Linda Rose Rickman pushed open the door and stepped back into the roar.
Linda Rose Rickman pushed open the door and stepped back into the roar.
The corridor was a river of dark suits and urgent conversations. A researcher nearly collided with her, muttering an apology without looking up from his clipboard. The noise was a physical thing—clattering shoes, ringing phones, the bassline of democratic urgency. She moved through it on autopilot, her mind a million miles away, orbiting that tiny, impossible fact. Her hand, of its own volition, kept drifting to her abdomen, only to be snatched back to her side each time.
The shadow cabinet meeting was already underway when she slipped into the panelled room. Nodds from colleagues. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was mid-flow, leaning forward over the long table, his hands chopping the air to emphasise a point about public sector reform. His eyes flicked to her, a millisecond of acknowledgement, before returning to the Chancellor.
Linda took her seat, unzipping her portfolio. The crisp documents within seemed like artefacts from a previous life. She pulled out a notepad, her pen poised. The words swirled around her—efficiency targets, stakeholder engagement, core message discipline—a familiar lexicon that had suddenly lost all meaning. She felt like a translator who’d forgotten her own language.
“...and we cannot afford a perception of weakness on this, not with the polls as they are,” Tony was saying, his tone reasonable but firm. He glanced around the table. “Linda, you’ve been quiet. What’s the feeling on the backbenches about the health service annex?”
All eyes turned to her. She felt the weight of the little box in her bag, pressing against her ankle under the table. She cleared her throat, calling upon decades of muscle memory. “The feeling is one of acute anxiety, Prime Minister. They’re hearing from constituents about wait times, not Whitehall restructuring. The messaging needs to pivot from institutional reform to patient outcomes. Concrete, visible outcomes.” Her voice was steady, analytical. No one could have heard the earthquake beneath it.
Tony nodded, making a note. “Good. That’s good. We’ll circle back to that.”
The meeting ground on. Linda contributed where required, her comments sharp, her questions pertinent, all while a part of her brain screamed in a silent, sustained note. During a lull while the Defence Secretary dug for a paper in his bulky briefcase, Tony pushed his chair back and stood. “Right. Five minutes, everyone. Stretch your legs.”
The room broke into murmured conversations. Tony walked around the head of the table, pouring himself a glass of water from the carafe. He stopped beside Linda’s chair. “A word, Lin?”
She followed him to the bay window overlooking Parliament Square. The grey light washed over his face, making him look tired. He sipped his water, not looking at her, his gaze on the tourists milling below. This was their old habit—the quiet sidebar, away from the pack.
“You’re white as a sheet,” he said quietly, his Geordie accent softening the edges of his words. “And you were about three miles away during Digby’s presentation on transport. Which, to be fair, is a valid response to Digby on transport, but still. Not like you.”
Linda’s composure, the carefully maintained dam, developed a hairline crack. She opened her mouth to offer a professional deflection—late night, complex brief—but what came out was a stark, quiet truth. “I’m pregnant, Tony.”
He didn’t splutter. Didn’t start. He turned his head slowly to look at her, his politician’s eyes searching hers for the joke, the metaphor. He found neither. He saw only the profound, shocking reality of it.
“Christ,” he breathed, the word utterly devoid of spin. He blinked, his mind visibly racing, calculating the parliamentary arithmetic, the front page headlines, the human cost. Then, just as quickly, the calculations faded, replaced by something simpler. He leaned a shoulder against the window frame. “How far along?”
“Weeks. Just found out.”
“Alan?”
“He doesn’t know yet. I left him a message. He’s filming.”
A faint, understanding smile touched Tony’s lips. “Snape’s going to be a father. There’s a headline.” He grew quiet again, his gaze returning to the square. “This is… monumental, Lin. For you. Not just for the party. For you.”
“I know.” The two words contained multitudes—the fear, the hope, the terrifying vertigo of it.
“Right.” He drained his water glass and set it down on the windowsill with a definitive tap. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You are going to go home. Right now. Tell the Secretary you have a migraine. They’re vague and respectable. Then you are going to wait for your husband, and you are going to tell him, and you are going to have whatever conversation you need to have without a three-line whip hanging over you.”
She began to protest, the ingrained reflex of duty. “Prime Minister, the debate tonight—”
“Will be handled,” he interrupted, his voice gentle but final. “I am telling you this as your friend, Linda, not as your PM. Go home. Get some rest. Process this.” He turned to face her fully now, his expression earnest, stripping away the premier’s gloss. “And for God’s sake, stop looking like you’re about to be despatched to the backbenches. Your spot here is safe. It’s safe because I rely on you too much for you to disappear. That doesn’t change. The logistics will, dramatically, and we’ll face that when we come to it. But you are my right hand. That hasn’t changed and ti never will. We started this together and I intend to finish it together.”
The relief was so physical it felt like a dissolution of her bones. The political fear, the largest and most immediate, receded a crucial half-step. She hadn’t realised how tightly she was braced for professional annihilation until the threat was lifted. She nodded, unable to speak for a moment.
“Thank you, Tony.”
“Go on,” he said, squeezing her elbow briefly. “Get out of here. Send my best to Alan. Tell him… tell him congratulations from someone who knows a thing or two about chaotic households.”
He moved back towards the table, already shifting back into the persona of Prime Minister, calling the room to order. Linda gathered her things, offered a tight smile to the Chancellor, and walked out.
The roar in the corridor seemed softer now, or perhaps she was just better insulated against it. The migraine excuse was accepted with sympathetic nods. She walked out of the Palace of Westminster, the cool afternoon air hitting her face. She didn’t call for her car. She wanted to walk, to feel the solid pavement under her feet, to breathe.
She crossed Westminster Bridge, the Thames flowing muddily below. The wind whipped at her hair, pulling strands free from her impeccable chignon. She didn’t care. She pictured Alan, somewhere in a faux-stone corridor at Leavesden, draped in black wool, his face set in a permanent sneer for the camera. He would get her message. He would hear the tremor. He would come.
She reached the other side, her steps slowing. She placed a hand, openly now, against her stomach, beneath the tailored wool. A secret, for a little while longer. Just for her, and for the life quietly insisting on its own existence. Then she turned towards home, where her future, in all its terrifying, glorious complexity, was waiting.
Then she turned towards home, where her future, in all its terrifying, glorious complexity, was waiting.
“And… cut! Very good, Alan. Let’s reset for the close-up, marks, please. Back in five!”
The cavernous soundstage, with its false stone walls and perpetually floating candles, released its held breath. The crew began to move, a murmuring organism of logistics and light. Alan Rickman stood still for a moment, letting the chill of the dungeon set seep out of his bones. He pushed a greasy strand of the Severus Snape wig from his forehead and walked stiffly toward his chair, the heavy wool robes whispering against the concrete floor.
In the pocket of the modern trousers he wore beneath the costume, his mobile phone vibrated.
He pulled it out, the anachronism never failing to amuse him. One missed call. Linda. His heart did a small, familiar lift at her name, followed by a sharper click of concern. She never called during the day unless it was urgent. Parliament hours were as sacrosanct as filming hours.
He tapped the voicemail and put the phone to his ear, turning his back slightly to the gentle chaos of the set. Her voice. It was her Deputy Prime Minister voice at first, that controlled, low timbre. But within three words, he heard the fracture. The subtle shake she could hide from the Commons but never from him. ‘You need to come home. As soon as you’re wrapped… Don’t even change out of the full costume… I have a surprise. A big one. The kind that… reorders things.’
The message ended. He played it again. His mind, so adept at parsing subtext from a script, found layers of meaning that chilled him. It wasn’t illness. Her tone wasn’t pain. It was… seismic shock. Awed fear.
“Everything alright, Alan?”
He hadn’t heard Jo approach. J.K. Rowling stood nearby, a steaming paper cup in her hand, her eyes sharp and kind behind her glasses. She was one of the few here, one of the few in the world, who knew. Who understood the delicate, precious secret he and Linda guarded.
Alan looked at her, the phone clutched tight in his hand. He didn’t bother to construct a polite fiction. “It’s Linda,” he said, his own voice a low rasp, stripped of Snape’s theatricality. “Something’s happened. I don’t know what. She left a message. She sounds… I need to go.”
Jo didn’t blink. She simply nodded, a quick, decisive motion. “Go. Now. Mike will understand. I’ll square it.”
“The schedule—”
“Is a list of scenes. This is your life. Go.” She reached out and gave his black-clad arm a firm squeeze. “Call me. Let me know she’s okay.”
Gratitude, thick and warm, flooded his throat. He just nodded, unable to speak. He didn’t go back to his trailer. He walked straight off the soundstage, past puzzled PAs, through the hangar-like doors and into the grey afternoon of the studio lot. He drove home still in the foundational layers of the costume, the billowy shirt and trousers, his face pale with residual powder, the greasepaint lines still etched beside his mouth.
By the time he pulled into their driveway in a quiet, leafy street in West London, the Snape pallor was washed away at a service station sink. He was just Alan again, in a rumpled shirt and trousers, his own face grim in the rearview mirror.
The house was quiet. Not peaceful quiet. A waiting quiet. He found her in the kitchen, standing at the counter, her back to the door. A single china cup sat before her, steamless, full to the brim. She was staring at the garden, but her eyes weren’t tracking the sway of the cherry tree. She was utterly still, yet he could feel a vibration coming off her, like a tapped crystal glass.
He didn’t speak. He crossed the stone tiles quietly and simply wrapped his arms around her from behind, pulling her back against his chest. He felt the jolt that went through her—a sudden, subconscious tremor she’d been suppressing for hours. She hadn’t known he was there. Her hands came up and gripped his forearms, her fingers cold and tight.
“You’re ice,” he murmured into her hair.
She leaned her full weight back into him, a sigh shuddering out of her. “You came.”
“You called.” He held her tighter, his chin resting on her shoulder. “What’s happened? Is it Blair? The party? What’s wrong?”
A strange sound escaped her—a wet, breathy laugh. She turned in his arms, her face tilted up to his. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, wide with a look he couldn’t decipher. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t fear, not exactly. It was profound, world-altering shock.
“It’s not wrong,” she whispered, her voice raw. “At least, I don’t think it is. I’m… I’m completely blindsided, Alan.”
“Tell me.”
She took his hand. She led him not to a chair, but around the counter to where her leather portfolio lay open. From a zippered inner pocket, she drew out the small, colorful box. She placed it in his palm.
He looked at it. The branding, the promise, the sheer mundane intimacy of the object. His brain, so quick, so precise, refused to compute. It assembled the clues—her message, her tremor, this box—and arrived at an answer that was impossible.
His gaze snapped to hers. He saw the truth there, blazing and terrified.
“No,” he breathed, not a denial, but an expression of sheer, staggering improbability.
She nodded once, a sharp, helpless little movement.
He looked back at the box, then at her flat stomach beneath the elegant blouse, then at her face again. The world did not so much tilt as it reshaped itself, violently and perfectly, in that single, silent moment. A thousand questions—practical, medical, political, profound—rose and then dissolved into irrelevance. All that was left was the fact, and her.
“Christ,” he said, the word full of wonder.
And then he pulled her to him again, fiercely, burying his face in her neck, holding the woman who carried their impossible, reordering future as if she were the only solid thing left in a universe that had just exploded, and begun again.