62
About twenty-eight thousand hours later, Sam and I walk out of the arrivals gate of Terminal 5 at Heathrow and are met with the grinning and spectacular face of Hattie Ramsey.
She charges toward me, tossing both her arms around my neck with total abandon.
“Oh my God, hi! You look perfect. I missed you.” She pulls away from me the slightest bit, and God, I’ve missed her too. “Oh, hello—you’re quite swarthy right now, aren’t you?” Then she notices Sam hovering close by. “Oh my God, Georgia, don’t panic. But there is an outrageously beautiful man standing very near you.”
I bat away a smile. “I know.”
“Hi.” Sam flashes her a smile.
She looks at me. “Is he your carry-on?”
Sam pulls a face and nods at me. “I don’t think she can really carry that much with those twig arms—”
“No, she can’t.” Hattie nods solemnly.
I peer between the two of them, unimpressed. “Yes, she can.”
“She can’t really open jars on her own,” Hattie tells Sam, who gives her a knowing look.
“Couldn’t lift her own carry-on up into the overhead either.”
“But she can”—I give each of them stern looks—“solve a decades-old mystery and play poker so well that she’s been banned from two casinos in Monaco.”
Penny gives me a proud little wink before he offers his hand to Hattie. “I’m Sam,” he tells her.
She shakes his hand with both of hers, staring at him in awe and fascination. “I’m sure you are—wow!—God, Georgia—” She tears her eyes away from Penny to scowl at me. “You couldn’t flick me a text to give me a heads-up that you met Thor on the plane?”
“Sorry.” I shrug at the same time Sam says, “We actually didn’t meet on the plane—”
“No, don’t be sorry,” she says to me specifically, before she turns to Sam. “And what?”
I nod a couple of times. “Yeah, so—we actually have a lot to talk about…”
Hattie smirks, amused. “Do we just?” She grabs one of my suitcases and starts wheeling it toward the car park.
I flash Hattie a look that says, “I will tell you everything you want to know later, just behave right now,” and she sort of rolls her eyes, but that’s good enough for me.
“Hattie, Sam is my boyfriend,” I tell her.
“Yeah, no—that tracks. I mean, I’m pretty into that leggy Belgian model I’ve been hooking up with and I think maybe I’d like Sam to be my boyfriend.”
Penny pulls a face. “Sam is…flattered?”
Hattie nods regally. “Sam should be.”
I clear my throat. “Can Sam stay the night?”
Her eyes flick from me to Sam, so then I tack on, “Or actually, ideally, many nights?”
“Okay, wait—” She suddenly stops walking, hands on her hips. “What the fuck happened on this trip?”
It’s about a fifty-five-minute drive from Heathrow to Hattie’s and my Marylebone Lane apartment, and Sam and Hattie chat away the entire time. She asks a million questions about how we met and how we got together, and about midway through, she remembers it’s all because my dad died, so she does a wellness check to see if I’m okay, but when she realizes I am, it’s back to a million questions about Sam and everything else.
She’s riveted by the Alexis stuff—who I have texted a few times, by the way. We’ve arranged for a FaceTime next week. I don’t know what we’re going to talk about. I haven’t worked out whether we have anything in common yet, more than that we both knew my dad—although one might argue I didn’t really know him at all.
There is a curious form of grief that I find emerging within me, beyond that whole thing where my father died thinking I’d done something terrible to someone else, which is a thought that still feels like a knife twisting in my chest. But now as well, there’s this strange little haunting of what could have been. What could have been if my father felt empowered to be his whole self, embrace who he’d spent his whole life hiding—what would it have been like if he left my mother for the man he loved when we were younger? Oliver would have gone with Dad for sure, and imagine how different Oliver’s life might look if he had felt validated by his father the entire time. And Maryanne would have stayed with Mom, and no matter how little I might have been, I’ve always known that if Maryanne was one place, my best bet was being someplace else—so I probably would have gone with Oliver. Maybe none of the shit with Beckett would have happened. Maybe it still would have, but maybe they wouldn’t have sent me away. And I’ll never know, and as a general rule of thumb, I don’t allow myself to dwell on the what-ifs of life, but this one, this particular path that could have been mine to wander down—where maybe I could have had two fathers instead of none?
There’s still time, Sam has said more than once. There is a beautiful optimism to him that isn’t born from sunny idealism or anything close to naivety, but rather a deep sense of hope that was forged in him as he climbed out of the flames of addiction.
“You’re doing it again,” Sam says as he unzips his suitcase on my bedroom floor.
I blink myself back into the moment. “What?”
“That thing where you stare at me for a long time and don’t say anything, and it’s not sexually charged or judgmental, but I can literally see the thoughts pinging around behind your eyes, so what’s on your mind, Gige?”
He flicks me a look like he’s impressed with himself, then waits for me to speak.
I squint at him for a couple of seconds. “It’s just that you’re…really here.”
“Yes.” Sam nods, trying to follow along, but falls to confusion. “What?”
I gesture at him. “What are we going to do?”
“Like, tomorrow, do you mean?”
I shrug, sort of aimlessly.
Penny pulls a face. “I mean, I’m anticipating we’ll not sleep that well because jet lag this way is fucking brutal, so probably we’ll get up pretty early tomorrow morning and go get breakfast or something. What’s your favorite café here?”
I purse my lips, thinking for a second. “Granger & Co.”
“Okay.” Sam nods again. “So we’ll go there, and then after, I’ll probably call my old modeling agency—”
“What about visas?” I interrupt.
“Well I’m okay for now—as long as I don’t get paid here. But I guess I’ll eventually have to get one of those global talent ones.” He thinks for a second. “Or just marry you and get residency.”
I press my lips together and don’t let myself smile at the M word. Instead I ask, “What about your cafés?”
“Well, I just own them—they have their own managers. I only make the coffees there sometimes for fun.” He gives me a golden-retriever smile.
“But you’ll miss it,” I tell him.
Sam shrugs. “Yeah, but I’ll make you coffees for fun now.”
“So you’re really here?” I cross my arms over my chest. “Like, here-here?”
Sam glances around, as though he’s not tracking. “I’m…so confused as to what you thought was happening until now?”
“I don’t know,” I groan. “I guess I thought maybe you’d get here and change your mind—and I wouldn’t be angry if you did!”
“Well, firstly”—Penny gives me a stern look—“you should be. A man is only as good as his word. I said what I said. I meant it. And it’s worth you remembering, Gige—it’s my mind to change. It doesn’t happen separate to me. We are in agreement that love isn’t a feeling, right?”
I nod resolutely. “Correct.”
“Lust is a feeling and awe is a feeling, and both things I have for you at the minute in fucking spades, but I’m self-aware enough to know they’ll probably go away at some point or another—”
“I hope not,” I tell him.
Sam gives me this look, like I know better than that.
“Feelings change, Gige. They ebb and flow—I know you know that. You’ve been the primary support person for an alcoholic for the last six years, and you were what you were for Oliver out of love, not because of how you felt about him.” Sam raises his eyebrows knowingly. “I guarantee there were days where you were what you were to him despite how you felt about him in the moment…”
I nod again. “Yes.”
Penny pushes some hair behind my ear. “I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” Sam smiles at me, triumphant. “Now, can we order dinner from that Chicken Shop place? I’ve always wanted to try it.”