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Copyright Page

For Kelly and Errol

"AND O

In that location ARE DAYS

IN THIS LIFE,

WORTH LIFE AND

WORTH Decease."

PROLOGUE

At that place are and then many ways it could accept all turned out differently.

Imagine if she hadn't forgotten the book. She wouldn't accept had to run dorsum into the house while Mom waited outside with the car running, the engine setting loose a cloud of exhaust in the late-24-hour interval heat.

Or before that, even: Imagine if she hadn't waited to effort on her dress, so that she might have noticed earlier that the straps were likewise long, and Mom wouldn't take had to haul out her old sewing kit, turning the kitchen counter into an operating table equally she attempted to save the poor lifeless swath of purple silk at the very last infinitesimal.

Or later: if she hadn't given herself a newspaper cut while printing out her ticket, if she hadn't lost her phone charger, if there hadn't been traffic on the thruway to the airport. If they hadn't missed the exit, or if she hadn't fumbled the quarters for the toll, the coins rolling beneath the seat while the people in the cars behind them leaned difficult on their horns.

If the wheel of her suitcase hadn't been off-kilter.

If she'd run just a bit faster to the gate.

Though peradventure it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

Perhaps the day'due south collection of delays is abreast the point, and if it hadn't been 1 of those things, it would have simply been something else: the weather over the Atlantic, rain in London, storm clouds that hovered simply an hour also long before getting on with their mean solar day. Hadley isn't a big laic in things like fate or destiny, but then, she's never been a large believer in the punctuality of the airline industry, either.

Who ever heard of a plane leaving on fourth dimension anyway?

She's never missed a flying before in her life. Not once.

But when she finally reaches the gate this evening, it's to discover the attendants sealing the door and shutting downward the computers. The clock above them says half dozen:48, and just beyond the window the airplane sits similar a hulking metal fortress; information technology's articulate from the looks on the faces of those effectually her that nobody else is getting on that affair.

She'due south four minutes late, which doesn't seem like all that much when you lot think about information technology; it's a commercial pause, the flow betwixt classes, the time it takes to melt a microwave meal. Four minutes is aught. Every single day, in every single drome, at that place are people who make their flights at the very last moment, breathing hard equally they stow their bags and and then slumping into their seats with a sigh of relief as the plane launches itself skyward.

Simply not Hadley Sullivan, who lets her backpack slip from her hand as she stands at the window, watching the plane break away from the accordion-like ramp, its wings rotating as it heads toward the rails without her.

Across the sea, her father is making one last toast, and the white-gloved hotel staff is polishing the silverware for tomorrow night'due south celebration. Backside her, the boy with a ticket for seat 18C on the next flight to London is eating a powdered doughnut, oblivious to the dusting of white on his blue shirt.

Hadley closes her eyes, but for a moment, and when she opens them again, the plane is gone.

Who would accept guessed that four minutes could change everything?

1

6:56 PM Eastern Standard Time

11:56 PM Greenwich Mean Fourth dimension

Airports are torture chambers if you're claustrophobic.

It's not just the looming threat of the ride ahead—being stuffed into seats like sardines and and then catapulted through the air in a narrow metal tube—but also the terminals themselves, the press of people, the mistiness and spin of the identify, a dancing, dizzying hum, all motion and noise, all frenzy and clamor, and the whole thing sealed off by glass windows like some kind of monstrous ant farm.

This is just one of the many things that Hadley's trying not to think near equally she stands helplessly earlier the ticket counter. The lite outside was starting to disappear and her plane is now somewhere over the Atlantic, and she can feel something inside of her unraveling, similar the slow release of air from a balloon. Role of it is the impending flight and part of it is the airdrome itself, but more often than not—more often than not—it's the realization that she'll now be belatedly for the wedding ceremony she didn't even want to get to in the beginning identify, and something most this miserable little twist of fate makes her feel like crying.

The gate attendants have gathered on the reverse side of the counter to frown at her with looks of great impatience. The screen behind them has already been switched to announce the next flight from JFK to Heathrow, which doesn't exit for more than three hours, and it'due south quickly becoming obvious that Hadley is the just matter standing between them and the end of their shift.

"I'm sad, Miss," one of them says, the suppressed sigh evident in her voice. "There's zippo we can do only try to get yous on the later flight."

Hadley nods glumly. She'due south spent the past few weeks secretly wishing this very thing might happen, though admittedly, her imagined scenarios accept been a bit more dramatic: a massive airline strike; an epic hailstorm; an immobilizing case of the flu, or even the measles, that would prevent her from flying. All perfectly skillful reasons why she might have to miss her father's trip downwardly the aisle to marry a woman she's never met.

But being iv minutes tardily to your flight seems just a niggling too convenient, mayhap a tad suspicious, and Hadley isn't at all sure that her parents—either of them—will understand that it wasn't her fault. In fact, she suspects this might fall onto the very short list of things they'd actually agree upon.

It had been her own idea to skip the rehearsal dinner and arrive in London the morning time of the wedding instead. Hadley hasn't seen her father in more than a yr, and she wasn't sure she could sit in a room with all the of import people in his life—his friends and colleagues, the petty globe he'southward built around himself an ocean away—while they toasted to his health and happiness, the kickoff of his new life. If it had been up to her, she wouldn't even exist going to the hymeneals itself, but that had turned out to be nonnegotiable.

"He's nevertheless your dad," Mom kept reminding her, as if this were something Hadley might forget. "If you don't go, you'll regret it after. I know information technology's hard to imagine when you're seventeen, just trust me. One day you volition."

Hadley isn't and then sure.

The flight bellboy is now working the keyboard of her computer with a kind of ferocious intensity, punching at the keys and snapping her gum. "You're in luck," she says, raising her hands with a little flourish. "I can go you on the ten twenty-iv. Seat 18-A. Past the window."

Hadley's near afraid to pose the question, but she asks it anyway: "What fourth dimension does it go in?"

"Nine fifty-4," the attendant says. "Tomorrow morning time."

Hadley pictures the delicate calligraphy on the thick ivory wedding invitation, which has been sitting on her dresser for months at present. The anniversary will begin tomorrow at noon, which means that if everything goes co-ordinate to schedule—the flight and and then customs, the taxis and the traffic, the timing all perfectly choreographed—she'll yet accept a gamble at making it on fourth dimension. Only just barely.

"Boarding will starting time from this gate at nine forty-five," the attendant says, handing over the papers, which are all neatly bound in a niggling jacket. "Have a wonderful flight."

Hadley edges her mode toward the windows and surveys the rows of drab gray chairs, almost of them occupied and the rest sprouting yellowish stu

ffing at their seams like well-loved teddy bears. She props her backpack on top of her comport-on suitcase and digs for her cell phone, then scrolls through the contacts for her dad's number. He's listed just every bit "The Professor," a label she bestowed on him about a year and a half ago, soon subsequently it was announced that he wouldn't exist returning to Connecticut and the word dad had become an unpleasant reminder each time she opened her phone.

Her eye quickens now as it begins to ring; though he notwithstanding calls fairly frequently, she's probably dialed him only a handful of times. It's near midnight at that place, and when he finally picks upwards, his voice is thick, slowed by slumber or booze or maybe both.

"Hadley?"

"I missed my flight," she says, adopting the clipped tone that comes so naturally when talking to her father these days, a side effect of her general disapproval of him.

"What?"

She sighs and repeats herself: "I missed my flight."

In the background, Hadley can hear Charlotte murmuring, and something flares upwardly inside of her, a quick rise of anger. Despite the sugary e-mails the woman has been sending her e'er since Dad proposed—filled with wedding ceremony plans and photos of their trip to Paris and pleas for Hadley to get involved, all signed with an overzealous "xxoo" (every bit if 1 x and i o weren't sufficient)—it'southward been exactly one year and ninety-six days since Hadley decided that she hated her, and it will take much more than an invitation to be a bridesmaid to cancel this out.

"Well," Dad says, "did you get another one?"

"Yeah, but information technology doesn't get in till ten."

"Tomorrow?"

"No, tonight," she says. "I'll be traveling past comet."

Dad ignores this. "That's too tardily. It's too close to the ceremony. I won't exist able to pick you up," he says, and there's a muffled sound equally he covers the phone to whisper to Charlotte. "We tin can probably send Aunt Marilyn to get yous."

"Who's Aunt Marilyn?"

"Charlotte'south aunt."

"I'thousand seventeen," Hadley reminds him. "I'g pretty sure I can handle getting a taxi to the church."

"I don't know," Dad says. "It'due south your first time in London…." He trails off, then clears his pharynx. "Practice you lot think your mom would be okay with it?"

"Mom's non hither," Hadley says. "I gauge she caught the start nuptials."

In that location'due south silence on the other end of the phone.

"It'south fine, Dad. I'll meet you at the church tomorrow. Hopefully I won't be too late."

"Okay," he says softly. "I can't await to see y'all."

"Yeah," she says, unable to bring herself to say information technology back to him. "See you tomorrow."

It isn't until after they've hung upwards that Hadley realizes she didn't even ask how the rehearsal dinner went. She's not all that sure she wants to know.

For a long moment, she just stands there like that, the phone still held tightly in her manus, trying not to think near all that awaits her on the other side of the ocean. The odour of butter from a nearby pretzel stand is making her slightly sick, and she'd like nothing more than than to sit down, merely the gate is choked with passengers who've spilled over from other areas of the terminal. It's Fourth of July weekend, and the weather maps on the Television receiver screens evidence a swirling pattern of storms blotting out much of the Midwest. People are staking out their territory, laying claim to sections of the waiting area as if they programme to live there permanently. There are suitcases perched on empty chairs, families camped out effectually entire corners, greasy McDonald's bags strewn across the floor. Equally she picks her way over a man sleeping on his backpack, Hadley is keenly aware of the closeness of the ceiling and the press of the walls, the surging presence of the oversupply all around her, and she has to remind herself to breathe.

When she spots an empty seat, she hurries in that direction, maneuvering her rolling suitcase through the sea of shoes and trying not to retrieve about simply how crushed the silly regal dress volition be by the fourth dimension she arrives tomorrow morning. The plan was to have a few hours to go ready at the hotel earlier the ceremony, simply now she'll have to make a mad dash for the church. Of all her many worries at the moment, this doesn't rank particularly high on Hadley's list, but even so, it's a fiddling bit funny to imagine just how horrified Charlotte'due south friends will exist; not having fourth dimension to get your hair done undoubtedly qualifies as a major catastrophe in their books.

Hadley's pretty sure that regret is too slight a give-and-take to describe her feelings about like-minded to be a bridesmaid, only she'd been worn down past Charlotte'south incessant e-mails and Dad's countless pleas, not to mention Mom's surprising support of the thought.

"I know he's non your favorite person in the earth right now," she'd said, "and he'southward certainly non mine, either. Simply do you really want to be flipping through that wedding album one 24-hour interval, maybe with your own kids, and wishing you'd been a part of it?"

Hadley really doesn't call up she'd mind, really, merely she could come across where anybody was going with this, and information technology had just seemed easier to make them happy, fifty-fifty if it meant indelible the hair spray and the uncomfortable heels and the post-ceremony photo shoot. When the residual of the wedding party—a collection of Charlotte's thirtysomething friends—had learned about the addition of an American teenager, Hadley had been promptly welcomed with a flurry of assertion points to the due east-mail concatenation that was circulating among the grouping. And though she'd never met Charlotte before and had spent the last yr and a half making sure it stayed that way, she now knew the woman's preferences on a broad range of topics pertaining to the nuptials—important issues like strappy sandals vs. airtight-toe heels; whether to include babe's jiff in the bouquets; and, worst and about scarring of all, lingerie preferences for the conjugal shower or, as they chosen it, the hen political party. It was staggering, really, the amount of e-mail a wedding could generate. Hadley knew that some of the women were Charlotte's colleagues at the academy art gallery at Oxford, simply it was a wonder that any of them had fourth dimension for jobs of their own. She was scheduled to meet them at the hotel early tomorrow morning, but it now looks as if they'll have to go about zipping their dresses and lining their eyes and curling their hair without her.

Out the window, the heaven is a dusky pink now, and the pinpricks of light that outline the planes are beginning to flicker to life. Hadley can brand out her reflection in the glass, all blond hair and large eyes, somehow already looking every bit careworn and rumpled as if the journey were behind her. She wedges herself into a seat between an older human flapping his newspaper and so difficult she half expects it to upward and fly away and a center-anile woman with an embroidered cat on her turtleneck, knitting abroad at what could still turn out to be anything.

Three more than hours, she thinks, hugging her backpack, and so realizes in that location'southward no signal in counting downward the minutes to something you're dreading; it would be far more accurate to say two more days. Two more days and she'll be back home over again. Two more than days and she tin pretend this never happened. Two more days and she'll take survived the weekend she's been dreading for what feels like years.

She readjusts the backpack on her lap, realizing a moment too late that she didn't cipher it upwards all the style, and a few of her things tumble to the floor. Hadley reaches for the lip gloss kickoff, then the gossip magazines, simply when she goes to pick up the heavy black book that her begetter gave her, the boy beyond the aisle reaches it first.

He glances briefly at the cover before handing information technology back, and Hadley catches a flicker of recognition in his eyes. It takes her a second to understand that he must think she's the kind of person who reads Dickens in the airport, and she very nearly tells him that she'southward not; in fact, she'due south had the volume for ages and has never cracked it open. But instead, she smiles in acquittance, then turns quite deliberately toward the windows, simply in case he might be thinking nearly striking up a chat.

Because Hadley doesn't experience similar talking right now, not fifty-fifty to someone as cute as he is. She doesn't feel like being here at all, actu

marry. The day ahead of her is like something living and animate, something that'due south barreling toward her at an alarming rate, and it seems only a matter of time before it will knock her flat on her back. The dread she feels at the idea of getting on the plane—not to mention getting to London—is something physical; it makes her fidget in her seat, sets her leg bobbing and her fingers twitching.

The human being beside her blows his nose loudly, then snaps his paper back to attention, and Hadley hopes she's non sitting side by side to him on her flight. 7 hours is a long time, besides large a piece of your day to exist left to chance. You would never be expected to take a road trip with someone you didn't know, yet how many times has she flown to Chicago or Denver or Florida beside a complete stranger, elbow to elbow, next, equally the two of them hurtled across the country together? That's the thing most flying: You could talk to someone for hours and never fifty-fifty know his proper name, share your deepest secrets and then never encounter him again.

As the man cranes his neck to read an article his arm brushes confronting Hadley'south, and she stands abruptly, swinging her haversack onto one shoulder. Around her, the gate area is notwithstanding teeming with people, and she looks longingly toward the windows, wishing she were exterior right at present. She's non sure she tin can sit hither for three more hours, just the idea of dragging her suitcase through the crowd is daunting. She edges it closer to her empty seat and so that information technology might await reserved, then turns to the lady in the cat turtleneck.

"Would you listen watching my pocketbook for a minute?" she asks, and the woman holds her knitting needles very still and frowns upwardly at her.

"You're not supposed to do that," she says pointedly.

"It'due south just for a infinitesimal or 2," Hadley explains, simply the woman simply gives her caput a piffling milk shake, equally if she tin't comport to exist implicated in whatever scenario is about to unfold.

"I can watch it," says the boy across the aisle, and Hadley looks at him—really looks at him—for the beginning fourth dimension. His night pilus is a bit too long and there are crumbs downward the front of his shirt, but at that place's something striking about him, as well. Maybe it's the emphasis, which she'southward pretty sure is British, or the twitch of his mouth as he tries to keep from grinning. But her middle dips unexpectedly when he looks at her, his eyes skipping from Hadley back to the woman, whose lips are set up in a thin line of disapproval.

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