“Hadley?” Dad says, setting his glass down as he takes a step in her direction. “What happened?”
She’s crying in earnest now, propped up by the doorframe, and when she feels the first tear fall, she thinks—ridiculously—of Violet, and how it’s one more thing they’ll have to worry about when trying to fix her again.
“Hey,” Dad says when he’s by her side, a strong hand on her shoulder.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s just been a really long day.”
“Right,” he says, and she can almost see the idea occurring to him, the light going on behind his eyes. “Right,” he says again. “Time to consult the elephant, then.”
15
11:47 AM Eastern Standard Time
4:47 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Even if Dad still lived at their house in Connecticut, even if Hadley still sat across from him in her pajamas each morning during breakfast and called good night to him across the hall before bed, even then this would still fall under Mom’s job description. Absentee father or not, sitting with her as she cries over a boy is absolutely and unequivocally Mom Territory.
Yet here she is with Dad, the best and only option at the moment, the whole story pouring out of her like some long-held secret. He’s pulled a chair up beside the bed and is straddling it backward, with his arms resting on the seat back, and Hadley is grateful to see that for once he’s not wearing that professorial look of his, the one where he tips his head to the side and his eyes go sort of flat and he arranges his features into something resembling polite interest.
No, the way he’s looking at her now is something deeper than that; it’s the way he looked at her when she scraped her knee as a kid, the time she flipped her bike in the driveway, the night she dropped a jar of cherries on the kitchen floor and stepped on a piece of glass. And something about that look makes her feel better.
Hugging one of the many decorative pillows from the fancy bed, Hadley tells him about meeting Oliver at the airport and the way he switched seats on the flight. She tells him how Oliver helped her with her claustrophobia, distracting her with silly questions, saving her from herself in the same way Dad once had.
“Remember how you told me to imagine the sky?” she asks him, and Dad nods.
“Does it still help?”
“Yeah,” Hadley tells him. “It’s the only thing that ever does.”
He ducks his head, but not before she can see his mouth move, the beginning of a smile.
There’s a whole wedding party just outside the door, a new bride and bottles of champagne, and there’s a schedule to keep, an order to the day. But as he sits here listening, it’s as if he has nowhere else to be. It’s as if nothing could possibly be more important than this. Than her. And so Hadley keeps talking.
She tells him about her conversation with Oliver, about the long hours when there was nothing to do but talk, as they huddled together over the endless ocean. She tells him about Oliver’s ridiculous research projects and about the movie with the ducks and how she’d stupidly assumed he was going to a wedding, too. She even tells him about the whiskey.
She doesn’t tell him about the kiss at customs.
By the time she gets to the part about losing him at the airport, she’s talking so fast she’s tripping over the words. It’s like some sort of valve has opened up inside of her, and she can’t seem to stop. When she tells him about the funeral in Paddington, how her worst suspicions had all turned out to be true, he reaches out and places a hand on top of hers.
“I should have told you,” she says, then wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “Actually, I shouldn’t have gone at all.”
Dad doesn’t say anything, and Hadley is grateful. She’s not sure how to put the next part into words, the look in Oliver’s eyes, so dark and solemn, like the gathering of a distant storm. Just beyond the door there’s a burst of laughter, followed by scattered clapping. She takes a deep breath.
“I was trying to help,” she says quietly. But she knows this isn’t entirely true. “I wanted to see him again.”
“That’s sweet,” Dad says, and Hadley shakes her head.
“It’s not. I mean, I only knew him for a few hours. It’s ridiculous. It makes no sense.”
Dad smiles, then reaches up to straighten his crooked bow tie. “That’s the way these things work, kiddo,” he says. “Love isn’t supposed to make sense. It’s completely illogical.”
Hadley lifts her chin.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just that Mom said the exact same thing.”
“About Oliver?”
“No, just in general.”
“She’s a smart lady, your mom,” he says, and the way he says it—without a trace of irony, without one ounce of self-awareness—makes Hadley say the one thing she’s spent more than a year trying not to say aloud.
“Then why did you leave her?”
Dad’s mouth falls open, and he leans back as if the words were something physical. “Hadley,” he begins, his voice low, but she jerks her head back and forth.
“Never mind,” she says. “Forget it.”
In one motion he’s on his feet, and Hadley thinks maybe he’s going to leave the room. But instead, he sits beside her on the bed. She rearranges herself so that they’re side by side, so that they don’t have to look at each other.
“I still love your mom,” he says quietly, and Hadley is about to interrupt him, but he pushes ahead before she has a chance. “It’s different now, obviously. And there’s a lot of guilt in there, too. But she still means a lot to me. You have to know that.”
“Then how could you—”
“Leave?”
Hadley nods.
“I had to,” he says simply. “But it didn’t mean I was leaving you.”
“You moved to England.”
“I know,” he says with a sigh. “But it wasn’t about you.”
“Right,” Hadley says, feeling a familiar spark of anger inside of her. “It was about you.”
She wants him to argue, to fight back, to play the part of the selfish guy having a midlife crisis, the one she’s built up in her head for all these days and weeks and months. But instead, he just sits there with his head hanging low, his hands clasped in his lap, looking utterly defeated.
“I fell in love,” he says helplessly. His bow tie has fallen to one side again, and Hadley is reminded that it is, after all, his wedding day. He rubs his jaw absently, his eyes on the door. “I don’t expect you to understand. I know I screwed up. I know I’m the world’s worst father. I know, I know, I know. Trust me, I know.”