The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

  As they eat, their eyes drift to the television set in the corner of the café, where the weather updates are flashed over and over again. Hadley tries to focus on her dinner, but she can’t help sneaking a sideways glance at him every now and then, and each time, her stomach does a little jig entirely unrelated to the traces of mayo still left in her sandwich.

  She’s only ever had one boyfriend, Mitchell Kelly: athletic, uncomplicated, and endlessly dull. They’d dated for much of last year—their junior year—and though she’d loved watching him on the soccer field (the way he’d wave to her on the sidelines), and though she was always happy to see him in the halls at school (the way he’d lift her off her feet when he hugged her), and though she’d cried to each and every one of her friends when he broke up with her just four short months ago, their brief relationship now strikes her as the most obvious mistake in the world.

  It seems impossible that she could have liked someone like Mitchell when there was someone like this guy in the world, someone tall and lanky, with tousled hair and startling green eyes and a speck of mustard on his chin, like the one small imperfection that makes the whole painting work somehow.

  Is it possible not to ever know your type—not to even know you have a type—until quite suddenly you do?

  Hadley twists her napkin underneath the table. It occurs to her that she’s been referring to him in her head simply as “The Brit,” and so she finally leans across the table, scattering the crumbs from their sandwiches, and asks his name.

  “Right,” he says, blinking at her. “I guess that part does traditionally come first. I’m Oliver.”

  “As in Twist?”

  “Wow,” he says with a grin. “And they say Americans are uncultured.”

  She narrows her eyes at him in mock anger. “Funny.”

  “And you?”

  “Hadley.”

  “Hadley,” he repeats with a nod. “That’s pretty.”

  She knows he’s only talking about her name, but she’s still unaccountably flattered. Maybe it’s the accent, or the way he’s looking at her with such interest right now, but there’s something about him that makes her heart quicken in the way it does when she’s surprised. And she supposes that might just be it: the surprise of it all. She’s spent so much energy dreading this trip that she hadn’t been prepared for the possibility that something good might come out of it, too, something unexpected.

  “You don’t want your pickle?” he asks, leaning forward, and Hadley shakes her head and pushes her plate across the table to him. He eats it in two bites, then sits back again. “Ever been to London before?”

  “Never,” she says, a bit too forcefully.

  He laughs. “It’s not that bad.”

  “No, I’m sure it’s not,” she says, biting her lip. “Do you live there?”

  “I grew up there.”

  “So where do you live now?”

  “Connecticut, I guess,” he says. “I go to Yale.”

  Hadley’s unable to hide her surprise. “You do?”

  “What, I don’t look like a proper Yalie to you?”

  “No, it’s just so close.”

  “To what?”

  She hadn’t meant to say that, and now she feels her cheeks go warm. “To where I live,” she says, then rushes on. “It’s just that with your accent, I figured you—”

  “Were a London street urchin?”

  Hadley shakes her head quickly, completely embarrassed now, but he’s laughing.

  “I’m only playing,” he says. “I just finished up my first year there.”

  “So how come you’re not home for the summer?”

  “I like it over here,” he says with a shrug. “Plus I won a summer research grant, so I’m sort of required to stick around.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “I’m studying the fermentation process of mayonnaise.”

  “You are not,” she says, laughing, and Oliver frowns.

  “I am,” he says. “It’s very important work. Did you know that twenty-four percent of all mayonnaise is actually laced with vanilla ice cream?”

  “That does sound important,” she says. “But what are you really studying?”

  A man bumps hard into the back of Hadley’s chair as he walks past, then moves on without apologizing, and Oliver grins. “Patterns of congestion in U.S. airports.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” Hadley says, shaking her head. She looks off toward the busy corridor. “But if you could do something about these crowds, I wouldn’t mind it. I hate airports.”

  “Really?” Oliver says. “I love them.”

  She’s convinced, for a moment, that he’s still teasing her, but then realizes he’s serious.

  “I like how you’re neither here nor there. And how there’s nowhere else you’re meant to be while waiting. You’re just sort of… suspended.”

  “That’s fine, I guess,” she says, playing with the tab on her soda can, “if it weren’t for the crowds.”

  He glances over his shoulder. “They’re not always as bad as this.”

  “They are if you’re me.” She looks over at the screens displaying arrivals and departures, many of the green letters blinking to indicate delays or cancellations.

  “We’ve still got some time,” Oliver says, and Hadley sighs.

  “I know, but I missed my flight earlier, so this sort of feels like a stay of execution.”

  “You were supposed to be on the last one?”

  She nods.

  “What time’s the wedding?”

  “Noon,” she says, and he makes a face.

  “That’ll be tough to make.”

  “So I’ve heard,” she says. “What time’s yours?”

  He lowers his eyes. “I’m meant to be at the church at two.”

  “So you’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I suppose I will.”

  They sit in silence, each looking at the table, until the muffled sound of a phone ringing comes from Oliver’s pocket. He fishes it out, staring at it with a look of great intensity while it carries on, until at last he seems to come to a decision and stands abruptly.

  “I should really take this,” he tells her, sidestepping away from the table. “Sorry.”

  Hadley waves a hand. “It’s okay,” she says. “Go.”

  She watches as he walks away, picking a path across the crowded concourse, the phone at his ear. His head is ducked, and there’s something hunched about him, the curve of his shoulders, the bend of his neck, that makes him seem different now, a less substantial version of the Oliver she’s been talking to, and she wonders who might be on the other end of the call. It occurs to her that it could very well be a girlfriend, some beautiful and brilliant student from Yale who wears trendy glasses and a peacoat and would never be so disorganized as to miss a flight by four minutes.

  Hadley’s surprised by how quickly she pushes the thought away.

  She glances down at her own phone, realizing she should probably call her mother and let her know about the change in flights. But her stomach flutters at the thought of how they parted earlier, the ride to the airport in stony silence and then Hadley’s unforgiving speech in the departures lane. She knows she has a tendency to shoot her mouth off—Dad always used to joke that she was born without a filter—but who could expect her to be completely rational on the day she’s been dreading for months?

  She woke up this morning feeling tense all over; her neck and shoulders were sore, and there was a dull throbbing at the back of her head. It wasn’t just the wedding, or the fact that she’d soon be forced to meet Charlotte, who she’d spent so much energy pretending didn’t exist; it was that this weekend would mark the official end of their family.

  Hadley knows this isn’t some Disney movie. Her parents aren’t ever getting back together. The truth is, she doesn’t even really want them to anymore. Dad’s obviously happy, and for the most part Mom seems to be, too; she’s been dating their town dentist, Harrison
Doyle, for more than a year now. But even so, this wedding will put a period at the end of a sentence that wasn’t supposed to have ended yet, and Hadley isn’t sure she’s ready to watch as that happens.

  In the end, though, she hadn’t really had a choice.

  “He’s still your father,” Mom kept telling her. “He’s obviously not perfect, but it’s important to him that you be there. It’s just one day, you know? He’s not asking for much.”

  But it seemed to Hadley that he was, that all he did was ask: for her forgiveness, for more time together, for her to give Charlotte a chance. He asked and he asked and he asked, and he never gave a thing. She wanted to take her mother by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. He’d broken their trust, he’d broken Mom’s heart, he’d broken their family. And now he was just going to marry this woman, as if none of that mattered. As if it were far easier to start over completely than to try to put everything back together again.

  Mom always insisted they were better off this way. All three of them. “I know it’s hard to believe,” she’d say, maddeningly levelheaded about the whole thing, “but it was for the best. It really was. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  But Hadley’s pretty sure she understands already, and she suspects the problem is that it just hasn’t fully sunk in for Mom yet. There’s always a gap between the burn and the sting of it, the pain and the realization. For those first few weeks after Christmas, Hadley would lie awake at night and listen to the sound of her mother crying; for a few days, Mom would refuse to speak of Dad at all, and then she’d talk of nothing else the next, back and forth like a seesaw until one day, about six weeks later, she snapped back, suddenly and without fanfare, radiating a calm acceptance that mystifies Hadley even now.

  But the scars were there, too. Harrison had asked Mom to marry him three times now, each time in an increasingly creative fashion—a romantic picnic, a ring in her champagne, and then, finally, a string quartet in the park—but she’d said no again and again and again, and Hadley is certain it’s because she still hasn’t recovered from what happened with Dad. You can’t survive a rift that big without it leaving a mark.

  And so this morning, just a plane ride away from seeing the source of all their problems, Hadley woke up in a rotten mood. If everything had gone smoothly, this might have translated into a few sarcastic comments and the occasional grumble on the ride to the airport. But there was a message from Charlotte first thing, reminding her what time to be at the hotel to get ready, and the sound of her clipped British accent set Hadley’s teeth on edge in a way that meant the rest of the day was as good as doomed.

  Later, of course, her suitcase refused to zip, and Mom nixed the chandelier earrings she’d planned to wear for the ceremony, then proceeded to ask her eighty-five times whether she had her passport. The toast was burned and Hadley got jam on her sweatshirt and when she drove the car to the drugstore to pick up a mini bottle of shampoo, it began to rain and one of the windshield wipers broke and she ended up waiting at the gas station for nearly forty-five minutes behind a guy who didn’t know how to check his own oil. And all the while, the clock kept lurching forward toward the time when they’d have to leave. So when she walked back into the house and threw the keys on the kitchen table, she was in no mood for Mom’s eighty-sixth inquiry about her passport.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “I have it.”

  “I’m just asking,” Mom said, raising her eyebrows innocently, and Hadley gave her a mutinous look.

  “Sure you don’t want to march me onto the plane, too?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Or maybe you should escort me all the way to London to make sure I actually go.”

  There was a note of warning in Mom’s voice. “Hadley.”

  “I mean, why should I be the only one who has to watch him get married to that woman? I don’t understand why I have to go at all, much less by myself.”

  Mom pursed her lips in a look that unmistakably conveyed her disappointment, but by then, Hadley didn’t really even care.

  Later, they rode the entire way to the airport in stubborn silence, an encore performance of the fight they’d been having for weeks now. And by the time they pulled up to the departures area, every part of Hadley seemed to be tingling with a kind of nervous energy.

  Mom switched off the engine, but neither of them moved to get out of the car.

  “It’ll be fine,” Mom said after a moment, her voice soft. “It really will.”

  Hadley swiveled to face her. “He’s getting married, Mom. How can it be fine?”

  “I just think it’s important that you be there—”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said sharply, cutting her off. “You’ve mentioned that.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Mom said again.

  Hadley grabbed her sweatshirt and unbuckled her seat belt. “Well, then it’s your fault if anything happens.”

  “Like what?” Mom asked wearily, and Hadley—buzzing with a kind of anger that made her feel both entirely invincible and incredibly young—reached out to fling open the door.

  “Like if my plane crashes or something,” she said, not really even sure why she was saying it, except that she was bitter and frustrated and scared, and isn’t that how most things like that get said? “Then you’ll have managed to lose both of us.”

  They stared at each other, the awful, unrecallable words settling between them like so many bricks, and after a moment Hadley stepped out of the car, swinging her backpack up onto her shoulder and then grabbing her suitcase from the backseat.

  “Hadley,” Mom said, jumping out on the other side and looking at her from across the hood. “Don’t just—”

  “I’ll call you when I get there,” Hadley said, already heading toward the terminal. She could feel Mom watching her the whole way, but some fragile instinct, some mistaken sense of pride, made her refuse to turn around again.

  Now, sitting in the little airport café, her thumb hovers over the button on her phone. She takes a deep breath before pressing it, her heart pounding in the quiet spaces between rings.

  The words she spoke earlier are still echoing in her mind; Hadley isn’t superstitious by nature, but that she so thoughtlessly invoked the possibility of a plane crash right before her flight is nearly enough to make her sick. She thinks about the plane she was supposed to take, already well on its way across the ocean by now, and she feels a sharp sting of regret, hoping that she didn’t somehow mess with the mysterious workings of timing and chance.

  A part of her is relieved when she gets her mom’s voice mail. As she starts to leave a message about the change in plans, she sees Oliver approaching again. For a moment she thinks she recognizes something in the look on his face, the same tortured worry she can feel in herself right now, but when he spots her something shifts, and he’s back again, looking unruffled and almost cheerful, an easy smile lighting his eyes.

  Hadley has trailed off in the middle of her message, and Oliver points to her phone as he grabs his bag, then jerks his thumb in the direction of the gate. She opens her mouth to tell him she’ll only be a minute, but he’s already off, and so she finishes the message hastily.

  “So I’ll call when I get there tomorrow,” she says into the phone, her voice wavering slightly. “And Mom? I’m sorry about before, okay? I didn’t mean it.”

  Afterward, when she heads back to the gate, she scans the area for Oliver’s blue shirt, but he’s nowhere in sight. Rather than wait for him amid the crowd of restless travelers, she circles back to use the bathroom, then pokes around the gift shops and bookstores and newspaper stands, wandering the terminal until it’s finally time to board.

  As she falls into line, Hadley realizes she’s almost too tired to even be anxious at this point. It feels like she’s been here for days now, and there’s so much more ahead of her to worry about, too: the closeness of the cabin, the panicky feeling that comes with no escape route. There’s the wedding and the reception
, meeting Charlotte, and seeing Dad for the first time in more than a year. But for now, she just wants to put on her headphones, close her eyes, and sleep. To be set in motion, sent careening across the ocean without any effort on her part, seems almost like a miracle.

  When it’s her turn to hand over her ticket, the flight attendant smiles from beneath his mustache. “Scared of flying?”

  Hadley forces herself to unclench her hand, where she’s been gripping the handle of her suitcase with white knuckles. She smiles ruefully.

  “Scared of landing,” she says, then steps onto the plane anyway.

  4

  9:58 PM Eastern Standard Time

  2:58 AM Greenwich Mean Time

  By the time Oliver appears at the top of the aisle, Hadley is already sitting by the window with her seat belt fastened and her bag stowed safely in the overhead bin. She’s spent the past seven minutes pretending she wasn’t interested in his arrival, counting planes out the window and examining the pattern on the back of the seat in front of her. But really, she’s just been waiting for him, and when he finally arrives at their row she finds herself blushing for no good reason other than that he’s quite suddenly looming over her with that tilted grin of his. There’s a kind of unfamiliar electricity that goes through her at the nearness of him, and she can’t help wondering if he feels it, too.

  “Lost you in there,” he says, and she manages a nod, happy to be found again.

  He hefts his hanging bag up above before scooting into the middle seat beside her, awkwardly arranging his too-long legs in front of him and situating the rest of himself between the unforgiving armrests. Hadley glances at him, her heart thudding at his sudden proximity, at the casual way he’s positioned himself so close to her.

  “I’ll just stay for a minute,” he says, leaning back. “Till somebody else comes.”

  She realizes that a part of her is already composing the story for the benefit of her friends: the one about how she met a cute guy with a great accent on a plane and they spent the whole time talking. But the other part of her, the more practical part, is worried about arriving in London tomorrow morning for her father’s wedding without having slept. Because how could she possibly go to sleep with him beside her like this? His elbow is brushing against hers and their kneecaps are nearly touching; there’s a dizzying smell to him, too, a wonderfully boyish mixture of deodorant and shampoo.