The Dilemma(35)

I felt sick as I went onto Cleo’s Facebook page. There were photos of Stanley Market, and other views of Hong Kong, but Rob wasn’t in any of them. There were a couple of selfies of Cleo, one with a caption underneath: Visiting on my own again today, followed by a sad-faced emoji. Looking back at other posts, it was clear that since she and Rob had arrived in Hong Kong, Cleo had been doing a lot of sightseeing on her own. I tried to close my eyes to the truth staring me in the face, telling myself that Marnie would never have done something so immoral, so damaging, as embarking on an affair with someone who had been part of our family since before she’d been born. It was inconceivable. Not only was Rob twenty years older than Marnie, he was also Jess’s husband, Nelson’s brother and the father of her best friend.

I remember the nausea that rose up inside me, the panic that swept through me when the floorboards creaked in the bedroom upstairs, a sign that Jess was out of bed and on her way down to the kitchen. Snatching up my bag, I ran into the hall and out of the door, grabbing my car keys as I went. And then I drove, not to the office, but out to the country, where I parked up and burst into tears.





5 P.M. – 6 P.M.





Adam


‘Do you need me to do anything?’ I ask Livia, desperate to leave the terrace.

‘No, it’s fine,’ she says, getting to her feet at the sound of the caterers arriving. ‘Why don’t you go and get ready? I’ll need the bathroom from six o’clock.’

As I go into the house, my phone beeps, telling me a message has come in. I stop at the bottom of the stairs, my heart crashing in my chest, my hands shaking as I pull my mobile from my pocket. I close my eyes, offer a silent prayer, then look. It’s a message from Izzy.

Hey bro! Hope Liv’s having a great day. Ian and I are running bit late but will see you as soon as we can get there. Can’t wait! xx

Crushing disappointment makes me want to hurl my phone at the wall. I can’t go on like this, I can’t keep waiting for Marnie to get through. As I go upstairs, I open the BBC news app to find the emergency number set up for relatives of those on the flight. If I explain that Marnie missed the flight and is somewhere at the airport, they might be able to get a message to her via the Pyramid Airline desk. A wave of guilt hits when I think of the families who are having to call the number for another reason, but I can’t think of any other way of contacting her.

Flooding in Indonesia is the main news, then a fatal stabbing in London. The plane crash is the third item down. There’s a photo next to the headline, a tangle of debris and flames. I sit down heavily on the bed and scroll quickly past it, looking for the number. Two words jump out at me – local reports. But – if there are videos coming out of Cairo Airport, why hasn’t Marnie been able to call me, message me? With a horrible sense of foreboding, I play one of the videos.

A young man is gesticulating. ‘I was standing right here,’ a voice translates, ‘and I could hear a plane, it was louder than usual and I looked up and I saw it, it was very low in the sky, I knew it should have been higher at that point because I often watch them, I see them just after they’ve taken off. But this one, instead of climbing higher, it stopped, right there, in the middle of the sky. And then it fell.’

The blood is pounding so hard in my ears that I struggle to keep up with what he’s saying. I knew it should have been higher at that point because I often watch them, I see them just after they’ve taken off. But the plane that crashed, the one Marnie should have been on, crashed twenty minutes into its flight. I remember calculating it, it crashed at eleven fifty-five, twenty minutes after its departure time of eleven thirty-five. So why did the man in the video say it had crashed just after take-off?

My fingers are shaking so much I can hardly hold my phone. I scroll back to the news report and scan the text, searching, searching for the information that will tell me that I’m right and everyone else is wrong, that the plane didn’t crash just after take-off but twenty minutes into its flight. Then I see it, in black and white – The plane crashed three minutes after take-off from Cairo International Airport – and I freeze, because the only way it can have crashed after take-off, at eleven fifty-five, is if it left late.

I can’t breathe. For a moment, the room spins. I close my eyes, tell myself to get a grip. I mustn’t panic, it’s going to be OK, I just need to calculate what time the flight actually left. It seems impossible to do the simple sum. I force myself to focus – it crashed three minutes into its flight and I know it crashed at eleven fifty-five, so all I need to do is take three from fifty-five to find its departure time. Fifty-two, the plane would have taken off at eleven fifty-two, not eleven thirty-five, so seventeen minutes late. Marnie’s flight from Hong Kong was meant to arrive in Cairo at ten fifteen, but the flight app I checked earlier confirmed her flight arrived at eleven twenty-five. If the Amsterdam flight only left at eleven-fifty-two then—

Nausea rises inside me. I lurch to the bathroom and stand over the sink, my hands gripping the sides, willing myself not to be sick. I stare at my face in the mirror, searching desperately for something to ground me, to stop my panic from spiralling out of control. What if Marnie made the flight? But she couldn’t have, I’d know, I’d know if something had happened to her. She’s such a part of me I’d just know. Marnie’s safe, she has to be.