“Ride it?” Jem suggests.
She’s on speaker. She rang for entertainment and distraction—she’s currently hiding in her parents’ spare bedroom with the disgraced Piddles, feeling (as she put it) “about the size of a frickin’ Borrower” after a lunch with her overachieving cousins. She was delighted when I told her I was actually chasing a man down at an airport, rom-com style.
“Don’t be ridiculous, they go at twenty miles an hour, max,” I say, hooting the horn again. “Oh my God, I’m going to have to get out.”
I yank on the parking brake and tumble out of the car, shooing the horse aside and then running back to Smartie.
“I’m on the move again!” I yell.
Jem gives me a little supportive whoop. I slam the brakes on as a pheasant trundles across the road.
“Argh, pheasant! Bloody New Forest wildlife!” I shout. “These animals have no respect for an epic love story!”
“Maybe that bird is on his way to his one great love,” Jem says. “Always remember you never know what kind of day someone else is having.”
“Can you not be sickeningly nice, just this one time?”
She laughs. “You’ll make it, little pigeon.”
“I really won’t! He’ll already be through to departures, I don’t know how I’m going to find him—how do people do it in films?”
“I dunno, actually,” Jem says thoughtfully as I climb up the gears, the pheasant having finally reached the other side of the road. “It involves a lot of running . . . and ducking under things. Or jumping over things.”
“I wish I’d gone to the gym more than once in the last six months,” I say, speeding up. “He won’t answer the phone, so that’s out. At least he’s tall. He’ll be easy to spot in a crowd. I’m just going to have to wing it when I get there. Oh, God, what if he never forgives me for being such a knob?” A wash of fear moves through me. “What if he doesn’t like me anymore? What if he’s just going to reject me all over again, in front of an airport full of people?”
“Then it’ll hurt,” Jem says. “But you’ll handle it.” Her voice softens into its lowest key. “You can cope with so much more than you think, Izzy. You’ve coped with the very worst thing in the world.”
I screech around a corner. “Do you think losing my parents has made me too scared of risking things? I always try to live life to the fullest, you know, but am I not actually doing that at all?”
“You are in so many ways—you’re so brave! But letting someone in, loving someone, that’s hard for all of us. And you’ve got the extra challenge of knowing what it feels like to say goodbye to the people you love most. So . . .”
“I’m going to do it, though,” I say, the adrenaline soaring. “I’m going to tell him I—I’m going to tell him I’m in love with him.”
“Go seize the day, my little pigeon. My romance-loving heart could really do with a happy ending right now.”
I can hear the smile in Jem’s voice.
“I’ll do my best to deliver,” I promise her, “and kill as few pheasants as possible in the process.”
“Atta girl.”
* * *
? ? ? ? ?
In all my wild imaginings of how this airport chase is going to go, I’ve been envisaging it like Love Actually or Friends. Sprinting through crowds, shouting Lucas’s name, desperate to find him.
I had forgotten what Bournemouth Airport is like.
It’s basically one room. There’s no queue for security—it’s all very calm. Slightly wrong-footed, I approach the woman checking tickets and passports.
“Hi! I don’t have a ticket! I’m here to tell a man I love him!”
She eyes me. “Roger,” she calls, without looking away. “We’ve got another one!”
Roger appears from somewhere, hitching up his belt. He is very large and looks very bored.
“May I start by saying, do not try to push past me,” Roger says. “I will catch you immediately and escort you to Bournemouth police station.”
If asking politely doesn’t work, pushing past the security guard is my plan B, so this is a blow.
“Now, which flight is this gentleman on?”
“To Rio de Janeiro!” I say breathlessly.
“Via Faro, then,” Roger says. He checks his watch. “You’re very late,” he says, displeased.
“I know! But—can I just go through and speak to him?”
“No,” says Roger.
“Please?”
This does seem to placate him slightly. Maybe the romantic-declaration types aren’t usually big on pleases and thank-yous.
“You can’t go through without a ticket.”
“Can I buy a ticket to somewhere? Where’s cheap?” I say, looking around wildly at the self-check-in machines.
“Do you have your passport?” asks the woman at the desk.
“Oh. No.”
“Then no, you can’t buy a ticket,” she says.
I shift from foot to foot. “What can I do?”
They both regard me steadily. They are ruining my momentum here. That flight is boarding right now, and they are talking so slowly.
“Look,” I say, pulling the Christmas card out of my back pocket. “Here. Last year, I wrote this card for the man I love, to tell him how I feel about him. I really put my heart on the line. And then I thought he read the card and laughed at it and kissed my flatmate under the mistletoe instead. But he didn’t! The card went to the wrong person, because people are really crap at reading handwritten notes, and I’ve been torturing this lovely man all year because I thought he was a dickhead and he wasn’t.”
“Your handwriting is awful,” Roger observes. “Is that supposed to be a C?”
“Aww, cosy warm heart,” says the woman. “That’s sweet.”
“Right?” I say desperately. I’ll take whatever wins I can get. “Can I go through? Explain the whole thing to him before he flies off to Brazil and never comes back?”
“No,” Roger says.
I just about refrain from screaming in irritation.
“Do you know what you want to say to him?” the woman asks.
“No,” I say. “Not at all. But I’ll know when I see him.”
The woman sucks her teeth.
“That won’t do,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s one way we can put you in touch with this gent,” she says. “But you’ll really need to know what it is you want to say.”
Lucas
“Attention, all passengers for flight 10220 to Faro . . .”
I try to eat another mouthful of my WHSmith sandwich. It makes me think of Izzy, and our trip to London together, when we had bought food at Waterloo before our train journey to Woking. How I’d realised what she meant to me that day—how obvious it had seemed.
I find it very sad that I am triggered by WHSmith, especially as there is nowhere else to buy a good sandwich right now.
“We have a message for Lucas da Silva.”
I freeze, sandwich halfway to my mouth.
“Dear Lucas.”
Que porra é essa?
“I have a confession to make. Last year, I wrote you a Christmas card.”
Is this some sort of cruel joke?
“I told you I was infatuated. That every time we crossed paths in the hotel . . .”
It must be. I set down my sandwich, heat rushing to my face.
“I felt hot and jittery. I asked you to meet me under the mistletoe at the Christmas party.”
This is her card to Louis. It’s all the parts he quoted to me, with that sly smile on his face. I want to press my hands to my ears, but it won’t block out the woman reading the message over the Tannoy—it’s too loud. There’s no escaping it.
“You were there when I arrived. Under the mistletoe. But you were kissing someone else.”
The woman beside me tuts. I look around—everyone is doing the same, looking for Lucas da Silva, presumably. I have a creeping sense of strangeness, as though everything I think I know is shifting, but I’m not there yet—I still don’t understand.
“I was heartbroken. Humiliated. And I took it out on you. I thought you were heartless and cruel. I spent a whole year avoiding you, one-upping you, making your life as difficult as possible. But, Lucas . . .”