Chapter 1: The Train That Never Came

8:47 PM. King’s Cross Station.

Sara stares at the departure board. The train to Darlington should have left seven minutes ago. She checks the app – "Delayed indefinitely."

Of course.

She settles onto the cold bench, laptop bag heavy in her hand. Inside it lives everything she has been to this point. Everything she no longer wants to be.

The platform is nearly empty. Just her and a man in a suit staring blankly at his phone. The overhead lights cast that familiar yellow glow – the kind that makes everyone look half-dead.

That's what we are, she thinks. Half-dead. Suspended between who we were and who we might become.

A maintenance worker walks by with a vacuum that sounds like a plane taking off. Sara follows the sound until it disappears into the tunnel. The silence that follows isn't just quiet – it's the kind of silence that makes you wonder if you still exist.

She opens LinkedIn on her phone. Forty-seven congratulatory messages. "Best of luck!" "You're going to kill it!" "So brave!"

Brave.

Sara laughs quietly. If they knew she'd quit without a plan, without a safety net, simply because she'd woken up one Tuesday morning unable to face another strategy meeting about synergies and "stakeholder alignment."

Her phone dies.

Just her and the yellow light now.

There's something strange about this station, she thinks. Like it exists outside of time.

The man in the suit has vanished. Did he catch a train? She saw no train arrive. He's simply... gone. Sara stands and walks to the platform's edge. Peers down at the tracks. The rails disappear into darkness, two parallel lines extending toward nothing.

"Excuse me," says a voice.

Sara turns. An elderly woman in a wool coat and handbag from the eighties stands there.

"Are you waiting for the train to Darlington too?"

"Yes," Sara answers. "You?"

"For sixty years now," the woman says, smiling gently.

Sara stares at her. "I'm sorry?"

"I took this train to work every day. Accounting assistant for forty years." The woman sits on the bench. "And then one day... I quit. Just like you."

"How do you know that I—"

"You can tell. Same look. Same fear of no longer knowing who you are."

"But you said sixty years?"

The woman nods. "Time works differently here. On the threshold between old and new. Some minutes can last for years. Some years pass in a blink."

Sara sits beside her. "Are you... real?"

"Are you?" the woman asks back.

They sit in silence. Sara notices her heartbeat slowing for the first time in months.

"What happens now?" Sara asks.

"Now we wait for you to understand."

"Understand what?"

"That the train has already arrived."

Sara turns to ask what she means, but the woman is gone. Only a faint scent of lavender lingers in the air.

The train doors stand open. Sara sees inside the car. It's warm and bright, filled with people in motion. Some reading books. Others gazing out windows. A young man sketching in a notebook.

They all look... so alive.

Sara finds an empty seat. Beside her sits a girl who looks like her, only younger. She holds a job application.

"First day?" Sara asks.

"Tomorrow," the girl replies nervously. "You?"

Sara looks out the window as the train begins to move. The yellow platform lights fade into darkness, then into something that might be dawn.

"Every day," she says, and finally means it.

// END EPISODE 1

A peak behind the scenes at the first draft for the chapter image: