A Wedding in the Sun

Chapter 1

‘He punched me in the arm, Mum! He’s a little shit.’

Jo paused, grumbling inwardly as the busy airport around her faded at her daughter’s words. Ben couldn’t take a little responsibility for his kids’ emotional stability at a time like this? Another ten days and the ‘little shit’ would be their stepbrother.

‘I’ll be there tonight,’ she assured Liss, hoping her daughter couldn’t hear the tightness in her voice. Tonight, she would turn up for the happy pre-wedding festivities for her ex-husband and the beautiful woman he was marrying. Sarcasm would only protect Jo from the shards of her marriage for so long.

‘That’s hours yet,’ Liss complained. ‘This whole time Dad’s made us look after Oscar.’

Her grip tightening on her suitcase, Jo swallowed some choice words for her ex-husband and wondered what she could say to placate her daughter when she agreed wholeheartedly. Ben should be supporting them through all the changes in their family, not forcing them to babysit, as though that was the only reason they were invited to this wedding that would create his new family. And from what Jo had seen of seven-year-old Oscar, he was a little shit.

‘I don’t even want to be here!’ Liss cried. ‘I’m seventeen. I’m not a flower girl! I don’t want to stand up with Mónica like she’s my new best friend, and the dress she bought is hideous!’

‘I thought you liked it,’ Jo responded to the easiest part of that sentence. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, as though that would slow down the spinning of her thoughts. ‘I just assumed it was what all the kids wear these days.’

‘Mum! I didn’t think I had a choice so I was nice about it. If you thought it looked ugly, you should have said something! I don’t even want to go to the ceremony. I’d rather be at school!’

Jo didn’t appreciate the reminder that the kids were missing school for this farce. The requirements of Mónica’s Spanish family seemed to be more important in the schedule than the children’s education and apparently the wedding was such an important occasion that it involved more than a week of ‘festivities’.

‘Maybe we can choose something else when I get there,’ Jo said, grinding her teeth. Ben even needed her to sort out the kids while he married someone else. God knows there was no other reason she’d attend his wedding. ‘Put Declan on?’

There was some rustling and then an inarticulate grunt, which was the usual greeting from her fourteen-year-old son.

‘Hey, Dec, hang in there, okay?’

‘Yeah, Mum.’

‘If Oscar gets too difficult, just let him play with your phone,’ Jo suggested, trying to tamp down on her worry.

‘I’m not going to let him touch my phone!’ Dec exclaimed, as though he’d rather be punched in the arm than let a seven-year-old near his prized possession.

Jo stifled a sigh. For all she knew, Mónica was one of these anti-screen mothers who would be horrified and Jo really shouldn’t feel satisfaction at the prospect of riling up Ben’s bride. Urgh, the word ‘bride’ made her gag.

Shaking off the awkwardness, she hitched her rucksack back onto her shoulder and started walking again, peering along the check-in desks for the one marked ‘Zaragoza’.

‘I’ll see you soon anyway, sweetie,’ she said to Dec.

She got another mumble in farewell before Liss came on again for a few more gripes that Jo was very willing to indulge. But despite her sympathy for her daughter, there was no point in escalating the already insufferable situation.

She softened her voice and said, ‘I’m sure Dad doesn’t realise that you feel sidelined and Oscar?—’

The name of Ben’s future stepson got stuck in her throat as she caught sight of a familiar figure at the check-in desks and whirled around, turning her back. She’d forgotten she’d see him at the wedding. If she stayed very still, perhaps he wouldn’t see her. Even if he’d heard his son’s name, he wouldn’t imagine the woman with her hair coming out of its clip and an ancient Fj?llr?ven backpack would have said it.

He wouldn’t recognise her. He was just the ex-husband of the soon-to-be wife of her ex-husband – which was complicated enough to give her a spontaneous migraine. But he was also her former Parent Teacher Association nemesis and she didn’t want to risk having to talk to him right now, on what was shaping up to be one of the worst days of her life. There wasn’t even a word for the relationship she had with that man – although awkward was one, certainly, even though she hadn’t seen him in three years.

His voice reached her ears: the burr of his Spanish accent, the animated tone, raised in indignation at that moment.

‘Mum?’ Liss prompted her over the phone.

‘I have to go, sweetie. I’m checking in my bag.’

‘Dad said we can’t come with him to collect you from the airport,’ her daughter said glumly.

‘What? Why not?’

‘Mónica’s husband is arriving on the same flight and we won’t fit in the car with all your luggage.’

Jo’s stomach dipped, wishing she’d had that information before she’d almost run into him. Glancing his way before she could stop herself, she saw him raise his hands in frustration, gesturing to a guitar case. At least Liss couldn’t see her eye-roll.

Adrian Rivera Morales – oh, sorry, Adrián, pronounced with an accent – and his blasted guitar.

‘I really have to go, but I’ll be there soon and we’ll work things out. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but we’ll find a way to have a good time together. After the family party is over, we’ll be down at the beach for a few days before the wedding.’ The wedding in a pretentious castle on the coast north of Valencia in Spain.

‘Yeah, we’re going to the beach in Pe?íscola,’ Liss said with a snort, ‘where you’ll drink all the?—’

‘Liss!’ Jo warned her in a low tone. If her daughter said ‘cocktails’, Jo would dissolve into laughter herself and hysterics might alert Adrián. Even an innocent cola joke would have pushed her too far right now. ‘I’ll see you soon! Love you. Bye!’

Ending the call with a stifled groan, Jo stowed her phone in her backpack and hesitated. Would Adrián be gone yet? Risking another glance over her shoulder, her frustration rose again to see him still arguing with the man at the check-in desk.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but if you wanted special care taken with this item, you should have booked an extra seat,’ the man said calmly.

‘I talked to someone on the phone a week ago and they assured me the instrument was booked!’ His voice was even higher than it had been before.

‘The luggage is booked, sir. Here, I could put a “fragile” sticker on it for you.’

‘?Ay! You think a little sticker will stop your staff from throwing this around like a rugby ball?’ She heard his exaggerated sigh from where she was standing and peeked over her shoulder again, wondering how long she would have to hide before he finished berating the poor man for doing his job. Why was he even bringing a guitar? The flight was in sardine-class with a low-cost carrier.

Adrián shoved his hands through his unnecessarily long, curly hair and grimaced. He had a moustache and a goatee too and that air of self-importance that only an attractive man can get away with, not to mention a thick gold chain that always peeked out of his collar as though he were a hip-hop star.

‘How much is an extra seat?’ he asked, his voice tight. Jo unfortunately understood the reluctance to shell out more money for an ex’s wedding. She was annoyed enough that she had to take time off work to attend a family party in a place with too many z’s in the name before the actual wedding the following week.

‘The flight is fully booked, I’m sorry.’

Jo clenched and unclenched her fists as Adrián lost it, Spanish curses tumbling out of his mouth and his arms gesticulating wildly. He slapped the counter in frustration.

‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to?—’

‘Fine!’ Adrián cried in a tortured tone. ‘Take it into the hold! Sit on it and toss it to each other and if anyone asks, tell them your airline damaged a palosanto de Rio guitar made by Ricardo Martín Gonzalez himself!’

‘If it’s damaged, you can download a claim form from our webs?—’

‘I don’t need a claim form! I need my guitar to arrive in one piece!’

‘This seems like a good instrument case, sir. If I just put the sticker on it?—’

Maybe he would decide not to get on the plane after all, Jo thought with expanding hope. Imagining Ben collecting them both from the airport made her nauseous.

With one last melodramatic choke, Adrián pushed off the counter and stalked away with a dismissive wave, as though he couldn’t bear to watch his precious guitar disappearing down the conveyor belt. Jo used her last dregs of human compassion to challenge the unkind thought that there had probably been a good reason Mónica had divorced him.

What fun this wedding was turning out to be!

Jo was nearly ready to turn around and go home ninety minutes later when she stepped onto the plane and caught sight of that familiar head of dark curls a few rows away, in an aisle seat, just to make her afternoon worse.

It was a small aircraft with a single aisle – even though the flight was booked out, not that many people wanted to go to Zaragoza on a Wednesday night. Two of them probably didn’t want to go to Zaragoza at all.

She wondered why Adrián was coming. Surely as the father instead of the mother he could have pleaded paternal incompetence and claimed it would be awkward if he turned up. For once, she wouldn’t have resented a man for that.

She peered at her boarding pass, holding it up to hide her face.

‘Thirteen F – it’s on the left just past the emergency exit row,’ the smiling flight attendant told her unnecessarily. Jo made her way along the aisle, inspecting the seat numbers intently enough that it was plausible that she hadn’t seen Adrián. He was reading the flight safety card with a stormy expression – although perhaps that was just his resting face.

She sensed movement as she walked past and her throat swelled uncomfortably, as she wondered if he’d looked up and opened his mouth to acknowledge her. It might have nipped the awkwardness in the bud, if only she’d had the courage to do that herself.

Oh, hi. Adrián, isn’t it? Oh, my, haha, isn’t this awkward going to the wedding of our exes? Are you on the PTA this year? Still refusing to play Santa at the Christmas Fayre? How about the choir? Are they skimming PTA money for their excursions this year as well, even though there are only two members?

Nope. There was no way she could have done that. With her instincts for self-preservation raging, she hurried to her row, flinging her suit bag into the locker over the seat and squeezing past a middle-aged woman and a young man with baggy clothes and baggier body language to reach her seat.

What had been Adrián’s problem with playing Santa anyway? Only someone a long way up their own arse would refuse to make children happy at Christmas and there was no harm in kids believing Santa had a Spanish accent.

Pulling her phone out to turn it to flight mode, she noticed she had a voice message from Liss and put the device to her ear to listen without Mr Baggy overhearing.

‘Mum, I just wanted to say sorry.’ Liss paused to take a breath and continued in a contrite tone, ‘I know there’s nothing you can do and I don’t mean to stress you out. But I just… needed to vent for a minute. I don’t even want to think about the wedding when I remember how things used to be…’ She sucked in a breath that might have been a sniff and Jo’s stomach sank. She knew what her daughter felt because she felt it too. ‘Anyway, I love you, Mum.’

Jo typed back:

Love you too, sweetie. Taking off now.

Only two hours and she’d be there to smooth things over for her kids – as best she could smooth over the fact that their father was getting married again. Liss was nearly an adult herself, but Jo was worried she’d taken the divorce four years ago harder than Declan had. She’d been old enough that she wanted to understand why the marriage was crumbling – something Jo still couldn’t answer with actual words.

Crap, now she was thinking about Ben and the twisting, crunching feeling when she saw him with Mónica that was one part disgust, two parts impotent moral high ground and fourteen parts heavy failure – with a pinch of jealousy that she didn’t want to admit to. She swiped at her eyes, gritting her teeth against tears. She was not still grieving their fourteen-year marriage, only the fourteen years of her own stupidity for thinking their marriage was worth all the sacrifices.

This was not where she wanted to be at forty-six: divorced, with a job that left her no time for her kids’ crises and in a narrow plane seat heading to a party with a bunch of strangers who only knew her as Ben’s ex-wife. If the mother of the bride was supposed to wear a nice outfit with a flamboyant hat, perhaps the ex-wife of the groom was supposed to wear a jute sack. That would have saved her bringing her suit bag with the flowing green evening dress that hopefully didn’t look as old as it was.

Rummaging in her rucksack, she tugged out her headphones, untangling them with a huff of frustration. Glancing ahead, she saw Adrián had managed to calm down now and she couldn’t help thinking he wasn’t the only one struggling with emotional outbursts today. She shoved her headphones in and sat back in her seat, closing her eyes.

It would all be over in ten days. She’d never have to see Adrián again – although the same wasn’t true for Ben and Mónica.

Listening to Pearl Jam and Radiohead and the bands that had got her through the nineties, the flight passed quickly, despite the seatbelt sign lighting up regularly as the little plane juddered its way southeast. A few times, Jo’s stomach dropped as the aircraft lurched, but she’d experienced turbulence before and, with her headphones in, she missed the murmurs of alarm that rippled through the passengers.

It was only when a flash of lightning lit up the dimming sky through her window that she sat up straight and pulled out her headphones. A flight attendant dashed up the aisle, stumbling as the aircraft heaved again and Jo gripped the armrests, trying not to let her brain wander in the direction of orphaned children.

‘Erm, this is the captain speaking,’ came a mumbled voice over the loudspeaker. ‘The predicted storm has hit a little earlier and a little more strongly than expected, so keep those seatbelts on, folks.’

Jo forced herself to breathe out. A storm. Surely planes flew through storms all the time. Another few minutes passed, the air in the cabin still and tense as lights flicked on and the aircraft shuddered and creaked.

Then the loudspeaker clicked on again and the captain cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you,’ he said, pausing, ‘that weather conditions over the Pyrenees have worsened. We can’t fly any further.’

Jo’s breath stalled. No, she didn’t want to go to Zaragoza, but she didn’t not want to go to Zaragoza either. Panic burst over her in a thousand questions without answers. Would they return to London? When was the next flight? How quickly could she get to Liss and Dec?

Jo’s hand flying to her forehead, her gaze settled on the back of Adrián’s head. She couldn’t even make this his fault.

The captain continued gravely, ‘We are preparing to make an unscheduled landing at the nearest airport.’

As she watched, as though in slow motion, Adrián turned and unerringly met her gaze.