“Now, which flight is this gentleman on?”
“To Rio de Janeiro!” I say breathlessly.
“Via Faro, then,” Roger says. He checks his watch. “You’re very late,” he says, displeased.
“I know! But—can I just go through and speak to him?”
“No,” says Roger.
“Please?”
This does seem to placate him slightly. Maybe the romantic-declaration types aren’t usually big on pleases and thank-yous.
“You can’t go through without a ticket.”
“Can I buy a ticket to somewhere? Where’s cheap?” I say, looking around wildly at the self-check-in machines.
“Do you have your passport?” asks the woman at the desk.
“Oh. No.”
“Then no, you can’t buy a ticket,” she says.
I shift from foot to foot. “What can I do?”
They both regard me steadily. They are ruining my momentum here. That flight is boarding right now, and they are talking so slowly.
“Look,” I say, pulling the Christmas card out of my back pocket. “Here. Last year, I wrote this card for the man I love, to tell him how I feel about him. I really put my heart on the line. And then I thought he read the card and laughed at it and kissed my flatmate under the mistletoe instead. But he didn’t! The card went to the wrong person, because people are really crap at reading handwritten notes, and I’ve been torturing this lovely man all year because I thought he was a dickhead and he wasn’t.”
“Your handwriting is awful,” Roger observes. “Is that supposed to be a C?”
“Aww, cosy warm heart,” says the woman. “That’s sweet.”
“Right?” I say desperately. I’ll take whatever wins I can get. “Can I go through? Explain the whole thing to him before he flies off to Brazil and never comes back?”
“No,” Roger says.
I just about refrain from screaming in irritation.
“Do you know what you want to say to him?” the woman asks.
“No,” I say. “Not at all. But I’ll know when I see him.”
The woman sucks her teeth.
“That won’t do,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s one way we can put you in touch with this gent,” she says. “But you’ll really need to know what it is you want to say.”
Lucas
“Attention, all passengers for flight 10220 to Faro . . .”
I try to eat another mouthful of my WHSmith sandwich. It makes me think of Izzy, and our trip to London together, when we had bought food at Waterloo before our train journey to Woking. How I’d realised what she meant to me that day—how obvious it had seemed.
I find it very sad that I am triggered by WHSmith, especially as there is nowhere else to buy a good sandwich right now.
“We have a message for Lucas da Silva.”
I freeze, sandwich halfway to my mouth.
“Dear Lucas.”
Que porra é essa?
“I have a confession to make. Last year, I wrote you a Christmas card.”
Is this some sort of cruel joke?
“I told you I was infatuated. That every time we crossed paths in the hotel . . .”
It must be. I set down my sandwich, heat rushing to my face.
“I felt hot and jittery. I asked you to meet me under the mistletoe at the Christmas party.”
This is her card to Louis. It’s all the parts he quoted to me, with that sly smile on his face. I want to press my hands to my ears, but it won’t block out the woman reading the message over the Tannoy—it’s too loud. There’s no escaping it.
“You were there when I arrived. Under the mistletoe. But you were kissing someone else.”
The woman beside me tuts. I look around—everyone is doing the same, looking for Lucas da Silva, presumably. I have a creeping sense of strangeness, as though everything I think I know is shifting, but I’m not there yet—I still don’t understand.
“I was heartbroken. Humiliated. And I took it out on you. I thought you were heartless and cruel. I spent a whole year avoiding you, one-upping you, making your life as difficult as possible. But, Lucas . . .”
I jump at the repetition of my name. I was just beginning to think this message must surely be for someone else. Because if it’s from Izzy—if that card was meant for me . . .
“You didn’t deserve that. Any of it. Because you never got that card—it went to the wrong person.”
I drop my head into my hands. It can’t be. Surely it can’t be.