The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight (12 page)

“Am I supposed to be somewhere?” she asks when she stumbles across Monty, who’s circling the vintage white limousine out front with great interest. He shrugs, then immediately resumes his inspection of the car that will presumably whisk the happy couple off to the reception later.

On her way back toward the church entrance, Hadley is relieved to spot a purple dress in the crowd, which turns out to be Violet.

“Your dad’s looking for you,” Violet says, pointing at the old stone building. “He and Charlotte are inside. She’s just getting her makeup retouched a bit before it’s time for photos.”

“When’s the reception?” Hadley asks, and the way Violet looks at her, it’s as if she’s inquired as to where the sky’s located. Apparently, this is a rather obvious piece of information.

“Did you not get an itinerary?”

“I didn’t get a chance to look at it,” Hadley says sheepishly.

“It’s not till six.”

“So what do we do between now and then?”

“Well, the photos will take a while.”

“And then?”

Violet shrugs. “Everyone’s staying at the hotel.”

Hadley gives her a blank look.

“Which is where the reception is,” she explains. “So I suppose we’ll probably go back there in between.”

“Fun,” Hadley says, and Violet raises an eyebrow.

“Aren’t you going to go find your dad?”

“Right,” she says without moving. “Yup.”

“He’s in the church,” Violet repeats, forming the words slowly, as if worried that her friend’s new stepdaughter might be a few ants shy of a picnic. “Right over there.”

When Hadley still makes no sort of overture to leave, Violet’s face softens.

“Look,” she says, “my father remarried when I was a bit younger than you are. So I get it. But you could do a lot worse than Charlotte as a stepmum, you know?”

In fact, Hadley doesn’t know. She barely knows anything about Charlotte at all, but she doesn’t say this.

Violet frowns. “I thought mine was really awful. I hated her for asking me to do even the smallest things, things my own mum would have made me do, too, like going to church or doing chores around the house. With stuff like that, it’s just a matter of who’s doing the asking, and because it was her, I hated it.” She pauses, smiling. “Then one day, I realized it wasn’t her that I was really angry with. It was him.”

Hadley looks off toward the church for a moment before answering. “Then I guess,” she says finally, “that I’m already a step ahead of you.”

Violet nods, perhaps realizing that there’s not much progress to be made on the subject, and gives Hadley’s shoulder an awkward little pat. As she turns to leave, Hadley is filled with a sudden dread for whatever it is that awaits her inside the church. What exactly are you supposed to say to the father you haven’t seen in ages on the occasion of his wedding to a woman you’ve never met? If there’s an appropriate etiquette for this sort of situation, she’s certainly not familiar with it.

Inside, the church is quiet. Everyone is outside waiting for the bride and groom to emerge. Her heels echo loudly on the tiled floors as she wanders toward the basement, trailing a hand along the rough stone walls. Near the stairs, the sound of voices drifts upward like smoke, and Hadley pauses at the top to listen.

“You don’t mind, then?” a woman asks, and another one murmurs something that’s too soft for Hadley to hear. “I’d think it’d make things tough.”

“Not at all,” says the other woman, and Hadley realizes that it’s Charlotte. “Besides, she lives with her mum.”

From where she’s standing, frozen at the top of the stairs, Hadley catches her breath.

Here it comes
, she thinks.
The wicked stepmother moment
.

Here’s the part where she overhears all the awful things they’ve been saying about her, where she discovers how glad they are that she’s out of the picture, that she’s not wanted anyway. She’s spent so many months imagining this, picturing just how awful Charlotte might be, and now that the moment is finally here, she’s so busy waiting for the proof that she nearly misses the next part.

“I’d like to get to know her better,” Charlotte is saying. “I really do hope they patch things up soon.”

The other woman lets out a soft laugh. “Like in the next nine months?”

“Well…” Charlotte says, and Hadley can hear the smile in her voice. It’s enough to send her backward several steps, stumbling a bit in her too-high heels. The empty halls of the church are dark and silent, and she feels suddenly chilled despite the temperature.

Nine months
, she thinks, her eyes pricking with tears.

Her first thought is for her mother, though whether it’s a wish to protect or to
be
protected, she’s not really sure. Either way, she wants nothing more than to hear her mom’s voice right now. But her phone is downstairs, in the same room as Charlotte, and besides, how could she be the one to break the news? She knows Mom has a tendency to take these things in stride, always as wholly unruffled as Hadley is irrational. But this is different. This is huge. And it seems impossible that even Mom could avoid feeling rattled by this piece of news.

Hadley certainly is, anyway.

She’s still perched there like that, leaning against the doorframe and glaring at the stairs, when she hears footsteps around the corner, and the deep sound of men laughing. She darts down the hall a little ways so that it won’t look as if she’s been doing precisely what she’s been doing, and is there examining her fingernails with what she hopes is a look of great nonchalance when Dad appears alongside the minister.

“Hadley,” he says, clapping a hand on her shoulder and addressing her as if they see each other every day. “I want you to meet Reverend Walker.”

“Nice to meet you, dear,” the elderly man says, taking her hand and then turning back to Dad. “I’ll see you at the reception, Andrew. Congratulations again.”

“Thanks so much, Reverend,” he says, and then the two of them are left there to watch as the minister hobbles off again, his black robes trailing behind him like a cape.

When he’s disappeared around the corner, Dad turns back to Hadley with a grin.

“It’s good to see you, kiddo,” he says, and Hadley feels her smile wobble and then fall. She glances over at the basement door, and those two words go skidding through her head again.

Nine months
.

Dad is standing close enough that she can smell his aftershave, minty and sharp, and the rush of memories it brings makes her heart quicken. He’s looking at her like he’s waiting for something—for what?—as if she should be the one to begin this charade, crack open her heart and spill it right there at his feet.

As if she’s the one with secrets to tell.

She’s spent so much time avoiding him, so much effort trying to cut him out of her life—as if it were that easy, as if he were as insubstantial as a paper doll—and now it turns out
he’s
the one who’s been keeping something from
her
.

“Congrats,” Hadley croaks, submitting to a somewhat stilted hug, which ends up as more of a pat on the back than anything else.

Dad steps away awkwardly. “I’m glad you made it.”

“Me, too,” she says. “It was nice.”

“Charlotte’s excited to meet you,” he says, and Hadley bristles.

“Great,” she manages to say.

Dad gives her a hopeful smile. “I think you two will get on brilliantly.”

“Great,” she says again.

He clears his throat and fidgets with his bow tie, looking stiff and uncomfortable, though whether it’s the tux or the situation, Hadley isn’t sure.

“Listen,” he says. “I’m actually glad I found you alone. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Hadley stands up a bit straighter, steeling herself as if to absorb a great impact. She doesn’t have time to be relieved that he’s actually going to tell her after all; she’s so busy working out how to react to the news of the baby—sullen silence? fake surprise? shocked disbelief?—that her face is wiped clean as a chalkboard when he finally delivers the blow.

“Charlotte was really hoping we’d do a father-daughter dance at the reception,” he says, and Hadley—somehow more stunned by this than by the far more shattering news she’d been prepared for—simply stares at him.

Dad holds up his hands. “I know, I know,” he says. “I told her you’d hate it, that there’s no way you’d want to be out there in front of everyone with your old man….” He trails off, obviously waiting for Hadley to jump in.

“I’m not much of a dancer,” she says eventually.

“I know,” he says, grinning. “Neither am I. But it’s Charlotte’s day, and it seems really important to her, and…”

“Fine,” Hadley says, blinking hard.

“Fine?”

“Fine.”

“Well, great,” he says, sounding genuinely surprised. He rocks back on his heels, beaming at this unexpected victory. “Charlotte will be thrilled.”

“I’m glad,” Hadley says, unable to hide the note of bitterness in her voice. All of a sudden she feels hollowed out, no longer in the mood to fight. She asked for this, after all. She wanted nothing to do with his new life, and now here he is, starting it without her.

But it isn’t just about Charlotte anymore. In nine months, he’ll have a new baby, too, maybe even another daughter.

And he hadn’t even bothered to tell her.

She’s stung by this in the same place that had been hurt by his leaving, the same tender spot that had ached when she’d first heard about Charlotte. But this time, almost without realizing, Hadley finds herself leaning into it rather than away.

After all, it’s one thing to run away when someone’s chasing you.

It’s entirely another to be running all alone.

8:17 AM Eastern Standard Time

1:17 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Late last night, as she and Oliver had shared a pack of tiny pretzels on the plane, he’d been quiet, studying her profile for so long without speaking that she’d finally turned to face him.

“What?”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

She frowned. “That’s a question you ask a four-year-old.”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “Everyone has to be something.”

“What do
you
want to be?”

He shrugged. “I asked you first.”

“An astronaut,” she said. “A ballerina.”

“Seriously.”

“You don’t think I could be an astronaut?”

“You could be the first ballerina on the moon.”

“I guess I’ve still got some time to figure it out.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“And you?” she asked, expecting another sarcastic answer, some invented profession having to do with his mysterious research project.

“I don’t know, either,” he said quietly. “Certainly not a lawyer, anyway.”

Hadley raised her eyebrows. “Is that what your dad does?”

But he didn’t answer; he only glared harder at the pretzel in his hand. “Never mind all this,” he said after a moment. “Who wants to think about the future, anyway?”

“Not me,” she said. “I can hardly stand to think of the next few hours, much less the next few years.”

“That’s why flying’s so great,” he said. “You’re stuck where you are. You’ve got no choice in the matter.”

Hadley smiled at him. “It’s not the worst place to be stuck.”

“No, it’s not,” Oliver agreed, popping the last pretzel in his mouth. “In fact, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now.”

In the hallway of the darkened church Dad paces restlessly, checking his watch and craning his neck toward the stairs every now and then as they wait for Charlotte to emerge from the basement. He looks like a teenager, flushed and eager for his date to arrive, and the thought crosses Hadley’s mind that maybe this is what
he
wanted to be when he grew up. Husband to Charlotte. Father to her baby. A man who spends Christmas in Scotland and goes on holiday to the south of France, who talks about art and politics and literature over slow-cooked meals and bottles of wine.

How odd that things turned out this way, especially since he’d been so close to staying home. Dream job or not, four months had seemed like such a long time to be away, and if it hadn’t been for Mom—who urged him to go, who said it was his dream, who insisted he’d regret passing up such an opportunity—Dad would never even have met Charlotte in the first place.

But here they are, and as if cued by Hadley’s unspoken musings, Charlotte appears at the top of the stairs, pink-cheeked and radiant in her dress. Without the veil, her auburn hair now hangs in loose curls to her shoulders, and she seems to glide right into Dad’s arms. Hadley looks away when they kiss, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other. After a moment, Dad breaks away and sweeps an arm in Hadley’s direction.

“I’d like you to meet my daughter,” he says to Charlotte. “Officially.”

Charlotte beams at her. “I’m so pleased you could make it,” she says, pulling Hadley into a hug. She smells of lilacs, though it’s hard to tell whether it’s her perfume or the bouquet she’s holding. Taking a step back again, Hadley notices the ring on her finger, at least double the size of Mom’s, which Hadley still sneaks out of the jewelry box from time to time, slipping it onto her thumb and examining the carved faces of the diamond as if they might hold the key to her parents’ unraveling.

“Sorry it took me so long,” Charlotte says, turning back to Dad. “But you only get to take your wedding photos once.”

Hadley considers mentioning that this is in fact Dad’s second time around, but she manages to bite her tongue.

“Don’t listen to her,” Dad says to Hadley. “She takes this long even when she’s just going out to the market.”

Charlotte whacks him lightly with her bouquet. “Aren’t you supposed to act like a gentleman on your wedding day?”

Dad leans in and gives her a quick kiss. “For you, I’ll try.”

Hadley flicks her eyes away again, feeling like an intruder. She wishes she could slip outside without their noticing, but Charlotte is now smiling at her again with an expression Hadley isn’t quite sure how to read.

“Has your dad had a chance to tell you about—”

“The father-daughter dance?” Dad says, cutting her off. “Yeah, I told her.”