She backs up against a wall and sets down her things, forgetting even to worry about the crush of people. Her mind is too busy with the possibilities. It could have been anything, really. His line could have taken longer. He could have been held up at customs. He might have emerged earlier and assumed that she’d gone ahead. They could have crossed paths and not even noticed.
He might simply have left.
But still, she waits.
The giant clock above the flight board stares down at her accusingly, and Hadley tries to ignore the mounting sense of panic that’s ballooning inside her. How could he not have said good-bye? Or was that what he’d meant by the kiss? Still, after all those hours, all those moments between them, how could that just be it?
She realizes she doesn’t even know his last name.
The very last place she wants to go right now is to a wedding. She can almost feel the last of her energy receding, like water spiraling down a drain. But as the minutes tick by, it’s becoming harder to ignore the fact that she’s going to miss the ceremony. With some amount of effort, she peels herself away from the wall to make one last sweep of the place, her feet heavy as she paces the enormous terminal; but Oliver, with his blue shirt and untidy hair, is nowhere to be found.
And so, with nothing more to be done, Hadley finally makes her way out through the sliding doors and into the gray London haze, feeling satisfied at least that the sun didn’t have the audacity to show up this morning.
8
5:48 AM Eastern Standard Time
10:48 AM Greenwich Mean Time
The line for taxis is almost comically long, and Hadley drags her suitcase to the end of it with a groan, falling in behind a family of Americans wearing matching red T-shirts and talking much too loud. Heathrow has turned out to be no less busy than JFK, though without the Fourth of July as an excuse, and she waits numbly as the line creeps forward, the lack of sleep finally beginning to catch up to her. Everything seems to blur as her gaze moves from the queue ahead of her to the departing buses to the line of black taxis waiting their turn, as solemn and silent as a funeral procession.
“It can’t be worse than New York,” she’d said earlier when Oliver had warned her about Heathrow, but he only shook his head.
“A logistics nightmare of epic proportions,” he’d called it, and of course he’d been right.
She gives her head a little shake, as if trying to rid her ear of water. He’s gone, she tells herself again. It’s just as simple as that. But even so, she keeps her back to the terminal, resisting the urge to turn around and look for him one more time.
Someone once told her there’s a formula for how long it takes to get over someone, that it’s half as long as the time you’ve been together. Hadley has her doubts about how accurate this could possibly be, a calculation so simple for something as complicated as heartbreak. After all, her parents had been married almost twenty years, and it took Dad only a few short months to fall for someone else. And when Mitchell had dumped Hadley after a whole semester, it took her only about ten days to feel done with him entirely. Still, she takes comfort in the knowledge that she’s known Oliver for only a matter of hours, meaning this knot in her chest should be gone by the end of the day, at the very latest.
When it’s finally her turn at the front of the line, she digs through her bag for the address of the church while the cabbie—a tiny man with a beard so long and white that he looks a bit like a garden gnome—tosses her suitcase roughly into the trunk without so much as a pause in conversation as he jabbers away into his hands-free phone. Once again, Hadley tries not to think about the condition of the dress she’ll soon be forced to put on. She hands over the address and the cabbie climbs back into the car without any sort of acknowledgment of his new passenger.
“How long will it take?” she asks as she slips into the backseat, and he halts his steady chatter just long enough to let out a sharp bark of a laugh.
“Long time,” he says, then pulls out into the slow crawl of traffic.
“Super,” Hadley says under her breath.
Out the window, the landscape scrolls by from behind a gauzy layer of mist and rain. There’s a grayness here that seems to hang over everything, and even though the wedding will be indoors, Hadley finds herself softening toward Charlotte for a moment; anybody would be disappointed with this sort of weather on her wedding day, even if she was British and had spent a lifetime learning not to expect anything else. There’s always that tiny piece of hope that this day—your day—will be the one to turn out differently.
When the cab pulls onto the motorway, the low-slung buildings start to give way to narrow brick homes, which stand shoulder to shoulder amid spindly antennae and cluttered yards. Hadley wants to ask whether this is part of London proper, but she has a feeling her driver would be a less than enthusiastic tour guide. If Oliver were here, he’d undoubtedly be telling her stories about everything they passed, though there’d be enough outlandish tales and not-quite-truths sprinkled in there to keep her on her toes, too, to make her wonder whether any of it was really true at all.
On the plane he’d told her about trips to South Africa and Argentina and India with his family, and Hadley had folded her arms as she listened, wishing she were on her way to somewhere like that. It wasn’t such a leap, from where she was sitting. There on the plane, it wasn’t so very hard to imagine they could be headed somewhere together.
“Which was your favorite?” she’d asked. “Of all the places you’ve been?”
He seemed to consider this for a moment before that one telltale dimple appeared on his face. “Connecticut.”
Hadley laughed. “I bet,” she said. “Who’d want to go to Buenos Aires when you could see New Haven?”
“What about you?”
“Alaska, probably. Or Hawaii.”
Oliver looked impressed. “Not bad. The two most far-flung states.”
“I’ve been to all but one, actually.”
“You’re kidding.”
Hadley shook her head. “Nope, we used to take a lot of family road trips when I was younger.”
“So you drove to Hawaii? How was that?”
She grinned. “We thought it made more sense to fly to that one, actually.”
“So which one have you missed?”
“North Dakota.”
“How come?”
She shrugged. “Just haven’t made it there yet, I guess.”
“I wonder how long it would take to drive there from Connecticut.”