The Last Love Note(95)

‘Bill your meals to my room,’ I tell her. ‘And please tell me I’m not making a huge mistake?’

It had seemed so romantic in Norway. But I was half a world away from the site of potential failure. The knowledge that Hugh is in this very building is the most comforting and hair-raising information I could possibly be turning over in my increasingly anxious brain. Ironically, he’s the one person who would know how to pacify me.

‘The only mistake would be not trying,’ Grace says, shepherding Charlie into the lift. ‘You’d regret that for the rest of your life. Now go. And have a shower! You look like you’ve been awake for years.’



I key the card into the slot and lean on the door to my room, pull my bags inside and flop on the bed. It pulls me towards it. Cannot fall asleep now.

I leap up, fling open the bathroom door and hanging there is Sophie’s cocktail dress. Sleek. Sophisticated. Cobalt blue ‘to bring out the auburn’, apparently. Everything you’d expect from the office fashionista.

There’s plenty of time to get ready, so I run the bath and fill it with the hotel’s lavender-scented oil. Hopefully it will calm my increasing jitters. Maybe I’ll try the guided meditation I use on Charlie when he’s fractious. The guy who recorded it has the most soporific, lilting Scottish accent. I set the alarm for one hour from now, just in case . . .



I only wake up because the water is stone cold. My phone is on the chair beside the bath, and I peer at the time. It’s eight. EIGHT! Our meeting was at SEVEN. In my jet-lagged state I must have set the alarm for AM. I leap out of the water and dry myself off partly, grab the white robe off the back of the bathroom door along with my bucket list and Cam’s post-its and flee the room.

Please be there, I chant as I run down the carpeted hall, wet hair dripping, and push the elevator button frantically, not that it makes any difference. Eventually I give up on the lifts and fling myself into the fire stairwell, taking the steps three at a time in bare feet, which hurts. I should have worn slippers. Who does this? Well, Julia Roberts, obviously. But she was nineteen and stunning, and not jet-lagged to Norway and back . . .

When I burst out of the fire door on the ground level, all eyes in the lobby turn to me. Is it really that newsworthy for a forty-year-old mother to be running around the Grand Chancellor in nothing but a bathrobe, like a lovestruck teenager? I find the bar, which is packed with conference attendees and locals having a drink before the theatre, and stand in the middle of it, spinning around, searching for Hugh.

He’s nowhere. And of course I dashed out of my room with only the essentials, which apparently didn’t include shoes, clothes, my phone or the room key.

I’ve comprehensively messed this up, after so much seat-of-the-pants planning from the other end of the earth. What would Julia do? She’d talk to the doorman. He’d show her how to use cutlery properly and phone his friend in an expensive clothing boutique. But this isn’t the movies. I’ll have to beg the woman on the reception desk for Hugh’s room number.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,’ she says. ‘But I can put in a call to his room.’

It will have to do. It’s just not remotely the Hollywood way I saw this unfolding in my mind.

‘Your name is?’

‘Kate,’ I tell her. ‘Whittaker.’ In case he’s forgotten.

She dials a number and it rings out. ‘I’m sorry. No answer.’

This has all been such a massive anti-climax. I thank her for her efforts and walk despondently back to the lift well, pressing the up button, just once this time.

The bell chimes almost immediately. The doors open and Hugh is lounging against the back of the elevator looking at his phone, shirt sleeves rolled up, loose tie, patience stretched by a ‘client’ not turning up, no doubt. Me again.

He glances up to check he’s on the ground floor and does a double take when he sees me standing in front of him, in all my jet-lagged glory: bare feet, tangled red hair falling in wet ringlets on the unflattering robe emblazoned with the hotel’s logo. Neither of us speaks. We stare at each other like we’ve forgotten our lines, until the doors begin to shut and we both lurch forward and push them open with our hands.

He contemplates my attire and his eyes eventually come to rest on my face. ‘Still cavorting around in pyjamas, I see.’

‘Technically, no,’ I say. ‘Just the robe.’

He seems thrown off base by that.

‘But this evening isn’t turning out at all the way I’d planned,’ I add.

He laughs. ‘You’re meant to be standing under a Norwegian light show,’ he says. ‘Number one on the bucket list, remember? Best display in decades, apparently. What happened?’

The lift doors try to close on us again and this time Hugh blocks both of them and I just stand there, reaching for my bucket list and Cam’s post-its in my pocket. Exhibits A and B.

A warning bell starts to chime in the lift, and Hugh takes my arm and drags me inside it. The doors finally close and it’s just us. I push the number eight. Hugh’s floor, according to Sophie, who I’d texted earlier. I can’t remember the exact room number but I was prepared to knock on every door, Love Actually–style if I had to. There’s not a rom-com I won’t emulate.

‘Where are we going?’ he says.