The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight(45)
She doesn’t need pictures to know that she’s not part of his life anymore.
But he’s the first to notice her standing there, her dad, and though Hadley is ready for any number of reactions—anger that she left, annoyance that she’s late, relief that she’s okay—what she isn’t prepared for is this: something behind his eyes laid bare at the sight of her, a look like recognition, like an apology.
And right then, right there, she wishes for things to be different. Not in the way she’s been wishing for months now, not a bitter, twisted sort of wish, but the kind of wish you make with your whole heart. Hadley didn’t know it was possible to miss someone who’s only a few feet away, but there it is: She misses him so much it nearly flattens her. Because all of a sudden it all seems so horribly senseless, how much time she’s spent trying to push him out of her life. Seeing him now, she can’t help but think of Oliver’s father, about how there are so many worse ways to lose somebody, things far more permanent, things that can cut so much deeper.
She opens her mouth to say something, but before the words can begin to take shape, Charlotte beats her to it.
“You’re here!” she exclaims. “We were worried.”
A glass breaks in the adjacent room and Hadley flinches. Everyone in the sitting area is looking at her now, and the floral-patterned walls seem much too close.
“Were you off exploring?” Charlotte asks with such interest, such genuine enthusiasm, that it twists Hadley’s heart all over again. “Did you have fun?”
This time, when she glances in Dad’s direction, something in the look on her face is enough to make him stand from where he’s been perched on the arm of Charlotte’s chair.
“You okay, kiddo?” he asks, his head tilted to one side.
All she means to do is shake her head; at most, maybe shrug. But to Hadley’s surprise, a sob rises in her throat, breaking over her like a wave. She can feel her face begin to crumple and the first tears prick the backs of her eyes.
It’s not Charlotte or the others in the room; for once, it’s not even her dad. It’s the day behind her, the whole strange and surprising day. Never has any period of time seemed so unending. And though she knows it’s nothing but a collection of minutes, all of them strung together like popcorn on a tree, she can see now how easily they become hours, how quickly the months might have turned to years in just the same way, how close she’d come to losing something so important to the unrelenting movement of time.
“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.