The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight(22)

Oliver yawns and leans his head back against the seat. “I guess we probably should have slept more,” he says. “I’m pretty knackered.”

Hadley gives him a blank look.

“Tired,” he says, flattening the vowels and notching his voice up an octave so that he sounds American, though his accent has a vaguely Southern twang to it.

“I feel like I’ve embarked on some kind of foreign-language course.”

“Learn to speak British in just seven short hours!” Oliver says in his best announcer’s voice. “How could you pass up an advert like that?”

“Commercial,” she says, rolling her eyes. “How could you pass up a commercial like that?”

But Oliver only grins. “See how much you’ve learned already?”

They’ve nearly forgotten the old woman beside them, who’s been sleeping for so long that it’s the absence of her muffled snoring that finally startles them into looking over.

“What did I miss?” she asks, reaching for her purse, from which she carefully removes her glasses, a bottle of eye drops, and the small tin of mints.

“We’re almost there,” Hadley tells her. “But you’re lucky you slept. It was a long flight.”

“It was,” Oliver says, and though he’s facing away from her, Hadley can hear the smile in his voice. “It felt like forever.”

The woman stops what she’s doing, the eyeglasses dangling between her thumb and forefinger, and beams at them. “I told you,” she says simply, then returns to the contents of her purse. Hadley, feeling the full meaning of her statement, avoids Oliver’s searching look as the flight attendants do one last sweep of the aisle, reminding people to put their seat backs up, fasten their safety belts, and tuck away their bags.

“Looks like we could even be a few minutes early,” Oliver says. “So unless customs is a complete nightmare, you might actually have a shot at making this thing. Where’s the wedding?”

Hadley leans forward and pulls the Dickens book from her bag again, slipping the invitation out from near the back, where she has pressed it for safekeeping. “The Kensington Arms Hotel,” she says. “Sounds swanky.”

Oliver leans over to look at the elegant calligraphy scrawled across the cream-colored invitation. “That’s the reception,” he says, pointing just above it. “The ceremony’s at St Barnabas Church.”

“Is that close?”

“To Heathrow?” He shakes his head. “Not exactly. But nothing really is. You should be okay if you hurry.”

“Where’s yours?”

His jaw tightens. “Paddington.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near where I grew up,” he says. “West London.”

“Sounds nice,” she offers, but he doesn’t smile.

“It’s the church we used to go to as kids,” he says. “I haven’t been there in ages. I used to always get in trouble for climbing the statue of Mary out front.”

“Nice,” Hadley says, tucking the wedding invitation back inside the book and then shutting it a bit too hard, causing Oliver to flinch. He watches her shove it back into her bag.

“So will you still give it back to him?”

“I don’t know,” she says truthfully. “Probably.”

He considers this for a moment. “Will you at least wait till after the wedding?”

Hadley hadn’t planned on it. In fact, she’d envisioned herself marching right up to him before the ceremony and handing it over, mutinously, triumphantly. It was the only thing he’d given her since he left—really given her; not a gift mailed out for her birthday or Christmas, but something he’d handed to her himself—and there was something satisfying in the idea of giving it right back. If she was going to be made to attend his stupid wedding, then she was going to do it her way.

But Oliver is watching her with a look of great earnestness, and she can’t help feeling a bit uncomfortable beneath his hopeful gaze. Her voice wavers when she answers. “I’ll think about it,” she says, then adds, “I might not get there in time anyway.”

Their eyes drift to the window to chart their progress, and Hadley pushes down a wave of panic; not so much for the landing itself, but for all that begins and ends with it. Out the window, the ground is rushing up to meet them, making everything—all the blurry shapes below—suddenly clear, the churches and the fences and the fast-food restaurants, even the scattered sheep in an isolated field, and she watches it all draw closer, wrapping a hand tightly around her seat belt, bracing herself as if arriving were no better than crashing.

The wheels hit the ground with one bounce, then two, before the velocity of the landing pins them firmly to the runway and they’re shot forward like a blown cork, all wind and engines and rushing noise, and a sense of momentum so strong that Hadley wonders if they’ll be able to stop at all. But they do, of course they do, and everything goes quiet again; after traveling nearly five hundred miles per hour for almost seven hours, they now commence crawling to the gate with all the unhurried speed of an apple cart.

Their runway fans out to join others like a giant maze, until they’re all swallowed by an apron of asphalt stretching as far as Hadley can see, interrupted only by radio towers and rows of planes and the great hulking terminal, which sits bleakly beneath the low gray sky. So this is London, she thinks. Her back is still to Oliver, but she finds herself glued to the window by some invisible force, unable to turn and face him without quite knowing why.