The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

by Jennifer E. Smithwr

  One morning she was surprised to see only one of the birds. It landed lightly on the stone lip of the bath and danced around the edge without touching the water, rotating its rounded head this way and that with a sense of bewilderment so pitiful that Hadley had leaned to the window and peered up at the sky, though she knew it would be empty.

  There’s something of that in Oliver now, a reckless confusion that makes him seem more lost than sad. Hadley’s never been this close to death before. The only three missing branches of her own family tree belong to grandparents who died before she was born, or when she was too little to mark their absence. Somehow, she’d always expected this sort of grief to resemble something from a movie, all streaming tears and choking sobs. But here in this garden, there’s no shaking of fists at the sky; nobody has fallen to their knees, and nobody is cursing the heavens.

  Instead, Oliver looks like he might throw up. There’s a grayish tinge to his face, a lack of color that’s all the more startling against his dark suit, and he blinks at her without expression. His eyes have a wounded look, like he’s been hurt somewhere but can’t quite locate the source of the pain, and he pulls in a ragged breath.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says eventually.

  “No,” Hadley says, shaking her head. “I’m sorry I just assumed….”

  They fall quiet again.

  After a moment, Oliver sighs. “This is a little weird, right?”

  “Which part?”

  “I don’t know,” he says with a small smile. “You showing up at my father’s funeral?”

  “Oh,” she says. “That.”

  He reaches down and yanks a few blades of grass from the ground, tearing at them absently. “Really, though, it’s the whole thing. I think maybe the Irish had it right, turning it into a celebration. Because this kind of thing”—he jerks his chin in the direction of the church—“this kind of thing is completely mad.”

  Beside him, Hadley picks at the hem of her dress, unsure what to say.

  “Not that there’d be much to celebrate anyway,” he says bitterly, letting the pieces of grass flutter back to the ground. “He was a complete arse. No use pretending otherwise now.”

  Hadley looks up in surprise, but Oliver seems relieved.

  “I’ve been thinking that all morning,” he says. “For the last eighteen years, really.” He looks at her and smiles. “You’re sort of dangerous, you know?”

  She stares at him. “Me?”

  “Yeah,” he says, sitting back. “I’m way too honest with you.”

  A small bird lands on the fountain in the middle of the garden, and they watch as it pecks at the stone in vain. There’s no water there, only a cracked layer of dirt, and after a moment the bird flies away again, turns into a distant speck in the sky.

  “How did it happen?” Hadley asks quietly, but Oliver doesn’t answer; he doesn’t even look at her. Through the fruit trees lining the fence, she can see people beginning to walk to their cars, dark as shadows. Above them the sky has gone flat and gray again.

  After a moment he clears his throat. “How was the wedding?”

  “What?”

  “The wedding. How did it go?”

  She shrugs. “Fine.”

  “Come on,” he says with a pleading look, and Hadley sighs.

  “Turns out, Charlotte’s nice,” she offers, folding her hands in her lap. “Annoyingly nice.”

  Oliver grins, looking more like the version of himself she met on the plane. “What about your dad?”

  “He seems happy,” she tells him, her voice thick. She can’t bring herself to mention the baby, as if speaking of it might somehow make it so. Instead, she remembers the book, and reaches for the bag beside her. “I didn’t return it.”

  He glances over, his eyes coming to rest on the cover.

  “I read a little on the way over,” she says. “It’s actually kind of good.”

  Oliver reaches for it, thumbing the pages as he’d done on the plane. “How’d you find me, anyway?”

  “Someone was talking about a funeral in Paddington,” she says, and Oliver flinches at the word funeral. “And I don’t know. I just had a feeling.”

  He nods, gently shutting the book again. “My father had a first edition of this one,” he says, his mouth twisting into a frown. “He kept it on a high shelf in his study, and I remember always staring up at it as a kid, knowing it was worth a lot.”

  He hands the book back to Hadley, who hugs it to her chest, waiting for him to continue.

  “I always thought it was only worth something to him for the wrong reasons,” he says, his voice softer now. “I never saw him reading anything but legal briefs. But every once in a while, completely out of the blue, he’d quote some passage.” He laughs, a humorless sound. “It was so out of character. Like a singing butcher or something. A tap-dancing accountant.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t what you thought….”

  Oliver looks at her sharply. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “I don’t want to talk about him,” he says, his eyes flashing. He rubs at his forehead, then rakes a hand through his hair. A breeze bends the grass at their feet, lifting the heavy air from their shoulders. From inside the church, the music from the organ ends abruptly, as if it’s been interrupted.

  “You say you can be honest with me?” Hadley asks after a moment, addressing Oliver’s rounded shoulders, and he twists to look at her. “Fine. Then talk to me. Be honest.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything you want.”

  To her surprise, he kisses her then. Not like the kiss at the airport, which was soft and sweet and full of farewell. This kiss is something more urgent, something more desperate; he presses his lips hard against hers, and Hadley closes her eyes and leans in, kissing him back until, just as suddenly, he breaks away again, and they sit staring at each other.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Hadley says, and Oliver gives her a crooked smile.

  “You said to be honest. That was the most honest thing I’ve done all day.”

  “I meant about your dad,” she says, though in spite of herself, she can feel the color rising to her cheeks. “Maybe it’ll help to talk about it. If you just—”

  “What? Say that I miss him? That I’m completely gutted? That this is the worst day of my life?” He stands abruptly and, for a brief and frightening moment, Hadley thinks he’s going to walk away. But instead, he begins pacing back and forth in front of the bench, tall and lean and handsome in his shirtsleeves. He pauses, spinning to face her, and she can see the anger scrawled across his face. “Look, today? This week? Everything about it has been fake. You think your dad is so awful for what he did? At least your dad was honest. Your dad had the guts not to stick around. And I know that’s rubbish, too, but from what it sounds like, he’s happy and your mum’s happy, and so you’re all better off in the end anyway.”

  All except me, Hadley thinks, but she remains quiet. Oliver begins to walk again, and her eyes follow his progress like a game of tennis, back and forth and back and forth.

  “But my dad? He cheated on my mum for years. Your dad had one affair, and that turned into love, right? It turned into marriage. It was out in the open, and it set you all free. Mine had about a dozen affairs, maybe more, and the worst part is, we all knew. And nobody talked about it. Somewhere along the line, someone made the decision that we’d all just be quietly miserable, and so that’s what we did. But we knew,” he says, his shoulders sagging. “We knew.”

  “Oliver,” she says, but he shakes his head.

  “So no,” he says with a little shrug. “I don’t want to talk about my dad. He was a bloody jerk, not just because of the affairs, but in a million other ways, too. And I’ve spent my whole life pretending it’s fine, for my mother’s sake. But now he’s gone, and I’m done pretending.” His hands are balled into fists at his sides, and his mouth is pressed into a thin line. “Is that honest enough for you?”
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br />   “Oliver,” she says again, setting aside the book and rising to her feet.

  “It’s fine,” he says. “I’m fine.”

  From a distance comes the sound of his name being called, and a moment later a girl with dark hair and even darker sunglasses appears at the gate. She can’t be much older than Hadley, but there’s a confidence to her, a sense of ease that makes Hadley feel immediately disheveled by comparison.

  The girl stops short when she sees them, clearly surprised.

  “It’s almost time, Ollie,” she says, pushing her sunglasses up onto her head. “The procession’s about ready to leave.”

  Oliver’s eyes are still on Hadley. “One minute,” he says without looking away, and the girl hesitates, like she might be about to say something more, but then turns around again with a small shrug.

  When she’s gone, Hadley forces herself to meet Oliver’s eyes again. Something about the girl’s arrival has broken the spell of the garden, and now she’s keenly aware of the voices beyond the hedge, of the car doors slamming, of a dog barking in the distance.

  Still, he doesn’t move.

  “I’m sorry,” Hadley says softly. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “No,” Oliver says, and she blinks at him, straining to hear the words inside that word, beneath it or around it: Don’t go or Please stay or I’m sorry, too. But all he says is: “It’s okay.”

  She shifts from one foot to the other, her heels sinking into the soft dirt. “I should go,” she says, but her eyes say I’m trying, and her hands, trembling in an effort not to reach out, say Please.

  “Right,” he says. “Me, too.”

  Neither of them moves, and Hadley realizes she’s holding her breath.

  Ask me to stay.

  “Good to see you again,” he says stiffly, and to her dismay, he holds out a hand. She takes it gingerly, and they hover there like that, halfway between a grip and a shake, their knotted palms swaying between them until Oliver finally lets go.

  “Good luck,” she says, though with what, she’s not entirely sure.

  “Thanks,” he says with a nod. He reaches for his jacket and slings it over his shoulder without bothering to brush it off. As he turns to cross the garden, Hadley’s stomach churns. She closes her eyes against the flood of words that never reached her, all those things left unsaid.

  And when she opens them again, he’s gone.

  Her purse is still on the bench, and as she moves to pick it up again she finds herself sinking down onto the damp stone, folding wearily like the survivor of some great storm. She shouldn’t have come. That much is clear to her now. The sun is dipping lower in the sky, and though she has somewhere else to be right now, whatever momentum was propelling her before now seems to have disappeared entirely.

  She reaches beside her for the copy of Our Mutual Friend and leafs through it absently. When it opens to one of the dog-eared pages, she notices that the corner of the fold reaches halfway down the page like an arrow, its point landing at the top of a line of dialogue: “No one is useless in this world,” it reads, “who lightens the burden of it for any one else.”

  A few minutes later, when she makes her way back past the church, Hadley can see the family still huddled in the open doorway. Oliver’s back is to her, his jacket still resting on his shoulder, and the girl, the one who discovered them, stands just beside him. There’s something protective about the way her hand rests on his elbow, and the sight of it makes Hadley walk a bit faster, her cheeks reddening without her quite understanding why. She hurries past the pair of them, past the statue with its unwavering gaze, past the church and the steeple and the row of black sedans lined up and ready to lead them to the cemetery.

  At the last moment, almost as an afterthought, she places the book on the hood of the car in front. And then, before anyone can stop her, she takes off down the road again.

  14

  11:11 AM Eastern Standard Time

  4:11 PM Greenwich Mean Time

  If she were pressed for any sort of specific information about her journey back to Kensington—at what point she switched tubes, who was sitting next to her, how long it took—Hadley would have had a difficult time coming up with answers. To say that the trip was a blur suggests that she could recall at least some of it, no matter how fuzzy, but when she finally steps out into the sunlight again at the Kensington stop, she’s struck by the uncomfortable sensation of having skipped through time like a stone.

  Apparently, shock—or whatever this is she’s feeling—is among the more effective cures for claustrophobia. She’s just traveled unseeingly for half an hour, underground the whole time, and not once did she have to force her mind elsewhere. The location was beside the point; her head was already in the clouds.

  She realizes she left the wedding invitation inside the book, and though she knows the hotel is near the church and therefore somewhere in the neighborhood, she can’t for the life of her remember the name. Violet would be appalled.

  But when she flips open her phone to call her dad, Hadley notices there’s a message, and even before punching in her password she knows it must be from Mom. She doesn’t even bother listening, dialing her back right away instead, not wanting to risk missing her yet again.

  But she does.

  Once more it goes to voice mail, and Hadley sighs.

  All she wants is to talk to Mom, to tell her about Dad and the baby, about Oliver and his father, about how this whole trip has been one big mistake.

  All she wants is to pretend the last couple of hours never happened.

  There’s a lump in her throat as big as a fist when she thinks of the way Oliver left her there in the garden, the way those eyes of his—which had studied her so intently on the plane—had been focused on the ground instead.

  And that girl. She’s absolutely certain it was his ex-girlfriend—the casual way she’d sought him out, the comforting hand on his arm. The only thing she’s not certain about is the ex part. There was something so possessive about the way she looked at him, like she was laying claim to him even from a distance.

  Hadley slumps against the side of a red telephone booth, cringing at how silly she must have seemed, seeking him out in the garden like that. She tries not to imagine what they must be saying about her now, but the possibilities seep into her thoughts anyway: Oliver shrugging in answer to the girl’s question, identifying Hadley as some girl he met on the plane.

  All morning she’d been carrying with her the memory of the previous night, the thought of Oliver acting as a shield against the day, but now it’s all been ruined. Even the memory of that last kiss isn’t enough to comfort her. Because she’ll probably never see him again, and the way they parted is enough to make her want to curl up in a little ball right here on the street corner.

  The phone begins to ring in her hand, and she looks down to see Dad’s number on the screen.

  “Where are you?” he asks when she picks up, and she looks left and then right down the street.

  “I’m almost there,” she says, not entirely sure where exactly there is.

  “Where you have been?” he asks, and the way he says it, his voice tight, Hadley can tell he’s furious. For the millionth time today she wishes she could just go home, but she still has the reception to get through, and a dance with her angry father, everyone staring at them; she still has to wish the couple well and suffer through the cake and then spend seven hours traveling back across the Atlantic beside someone who will not draw her a duck on a napkin, who will not steal her a small bottle of whiskey, who will not try to kiss her by the bathrooms.

  “I had to go see a friend,” she explains, and Dad grunts.

  “What’s next? Off to see one of your pals in Paris?”

  “Dad.”

  He sighs. “Your timing could have been better, Hadley.”

  “I know.”

  “I was worried,” he admits, and she can hear the harshness in his voice beginning to subside. Somehow, she’d been so focuse
d on getting to Oliver that it hadn’t really occurred to her that Dad might be concerned. Angry, yes; but worried? It’s been so long since he played the role of anxious parent, and besides, he’s in the middle of his own wedding. But now she can see how her leaving might have frightened him, and she finds herself softening, too.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “How long till you get here?”

  “Not long,” she says. “Not long at all.”

  He sighs again. “Good.”

  “But Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you remind me where I’m going?”

  Ten minutes later, with the help of his directions, Hadley finds herself in the lobby of the Kensington Arms Hotel, a sprawling mansion that seems out of place amid the crowded city streets, like it was plucked from a country estate and dropped at random here in London. The floors are made of black-and-white marble, alternating like an oversized checkerboard, and there’s a great curving staircase with brass railings that stretches up beyond the chandeliered ceiling. Each time someone enters through the revolving doors, the faint scent of cut grass drifts in, too, the air outside heavy with humidity.

  When she catches sight of herself in one of the ornate mirrors hanging behind the front desk, Hadley quickly lowers her eyes again. Her fellow bridesmaids will be disappointed when they see that their hard work from earlier has been ruined; her dress is so wrinkled it looks like she’s been carrying it around in her purse all day, and her hair—which had been so perfectly styled—is now coming undone, stray wisps falling across her face, the bun in the back sagging badly.

  The man behind the desk finishes a phone call, replacing the receiver with a practiced flick of his wrist, and then turns to Hadley.

  “May I help you, Miss?”

  “I’m looking for the Sullivan wedding,” she says, and he glances down at the desk.