Chapter Forty-Five

June 2025

According to UNHCR, "Seventeen years is average time refugees are uprooted from their lives." By this sentence, refugees were refugees for seventeen years, where they were away from their lives and their homes. No one wanted to learn their home, their lives that they had always known, but sometimes you weren't given a choice. It was down to your survival, and your body wanted to survive. You needed to live, along with your family. You needed to escape. The hope was a better life, perhaps get to Europe or America or Canada. It was hard to make it there and hard to live there. Sometimes you weren't welcomed, which could grow to be worse, and sometimes you weren't allowed in.

The sprawling desert wasn't a welcomed sight for Lucy, since she never had enjoyed the desert while working in Africa all those years ago. It was too dry and too vast. It felt as if you would be swallowed up. The sand was too grainy and it brushed against your skin in the wind. The wind blew hard sometimes. The heat was just another thing for Lucy to hate. Harry was more used to the desert; he had worked in the desert numerous times before. Lucy had too, but she never welcomed it. She fought the heat as long as she could.

As soon as they stepped off the airplane in Jordan, Queen Rania of Jordan was there to welcome them, as beautiful as ever. The trip was only meant to be a few days, with the boys at home with their grandparents, but Lucy and Harry had an understanding. This would've taken a week at the least and two weeks would've been fine enough. Anything over two weeks, Harry would've flown back to be with the boys. Lucy knew how to handle herself, and this had always been her passion.

Queen Rania of Jordan walked with them as they toured the largest refugee camp in Jordan, which stretched on for miles and miles. The camp was big enough to be a metro area. All tents were inhabited. Families overflowed some tents. It was hard to watch as some children knew nothing more than this tent they had lived in for their entire lives, with the technical refugee crisis starting in 2013. These human beings, alone, came from the Middle East and Africa.

Queen Rania of Jordan explained along the way with other members of the group. There were translators around and there were members of the UNHCR and other humanitarian aid groups. The refugees, the human beings, looked on, wondering who the blonde woman and ginger man were, why were they important. Whispers echoed through the crowds, but they were mostly quiet. Cameras followed the couple as they walked along. Queen Rania spoke about her many times, as well as the time Charles and Camilla had visited.

The couple moved along the rows and rows of refugee tents. It wasn't just the sand that would've swallowed up the couple, but the thousands of rows of white tents that slowly turned brown, like it, too, got a tan. Eventually, the tents would match the color of the sand on which they laid. The promise of rain was just on the horizon with dark clouds looming. However, the June heat made it worse, but Lucy stayed still as she watched the people and scene in front of her.

Coming back here, it did feel better. It made Lucy feel comfortable again. For the time that Lucy and Harry dated, before the world knew of them together, she took trips to Jordan and Turkey. She had occasionally been on the front lines, which she wasn't supposed to talk about. Lucy had traveled to Greece and Italy more times than she could count, as she stood on the islands and waited for refugees to come ashore. A lot of them didn't make it. Lucy had waited a long time for some of those boats that never came, and no one could ever be sure how many human beings were on those boats.

Coming back here, it helped. It made Lucy feel better about her situation, because it made her able to think clearly. Since Sydney's death, and even a little before, something had been aching within her. She knew something was missing. That missing piece took a little bit from every part of her life. Coming back here, made her feel complete again. The aching decreased a little bit. The hole had been huge with Sydney's death, and she hadn't fully recovered. Her best friend took her own life, and it wasn't something to forget. Lucy's whole life wasn't something to forget. There were great moments, but the negative ones tended weigh the most. Coming back here, the negative ones floated off.

Freddie's birthday was July fourth, so surely Lucy would've been back by then, even though her birthday was yet to pass. It was early June, just the beginning days, and her birthday was early in June enough. Perhaps this was a birthday present to Lucy from Harry. She felt free out here.

The couple stayed in the refugee camp, in a tent, as they worked with the humanitarian aid workers. Lucy knew her job well, and Harry went with the flow. He, once again, was under Lucy's control. She had assumed a higher rank because of her past. Old friends of hers worked here and they took her in. They showed her the ropes once again, but Lucy hadn't looked to forgotten anything. Harry took her orders in stride. The few days passed quickly, and it really wasn't a shock to anyone that the couple decided to stay longer.

Lucy's birthday went as this: "Harry birthday, Luce," Harry said and kissed her the cheek. She turned twenty-eight years, and ten years ago, they had met. Time flew when you were having fun.

The one week passed easily, as the couple worked every day, sun up to sun down. Before the boys came, this was normal actually. There had been times where they had been in countries and done charity events like this. They had gone to work: gotten up before sunrise and gone to bed after sunset. It was fulfilling. Two weeks came too quickly, for both of them. Though, the wanting to go back to their boys happened, you tended to forget about the old lives. Cameras were gone and they were just normal people doing normal jobs. Harry went back to London to reunite with the boys.

Lucy worked at the refugee camp alone. She didn't mind. When she didn't work as a humanitarian aid worker, she walked up and down the tents, minding her own business. She never got to the end of them. She worked closely with an old friend of hers. They first met each other when she was eighteen, just like she had met Harry.

"Do you ever miss this?" he asked.

"All the time," she answered. "It makes me feel useful."

He laughed.

"Really," she admitted, "I sit there and I wear pretty dresses. This is real, where that isn't. You don't see real things. People know you're coming and they try to look their best. You don't actually see their normal lives, what's going on at home or how their work actually effects them. You don't know. And here, this is good. You see everything; you know everything. I miss this. This is me. This was what I was meant to do."

"Will you get back to it?"

"I'm sure, eventually." Lucy sighed. "I've got my kiddos at home, and I take care of them. They are my life, and I do charity events. It's not the same thing, though." Her eyes looked out on the horizon. "I know it to be true, I promise myself, when my kiddos are older, I'm going to be back out here again. I am going to be fighting the good fight. This is where I belong, even though I hate the desert."

"You've gotten the tan."

"That's because I was so pale in London." They walked on. Dust kicked up around them. "Perhaps I'll get back into in London. The refugee crisis didn't end over night, and some argue that it continues. No one got up and moved home. It's a process. I need to get back at it."

"Yeah, you do. You look happy here."

Lucy couldn't disagree with that.

It was only a week before Lucy was called back to London. She thought she had at least another week before coming home. She did miss her children, but there was a job to be doing here. So it was a surprise that she had only gotten through a week before she was called back to London. It was more of an emergency over anything else. No one was really prepared for it. It was bound to take its toll on everyone.