Chapter Thirty-One
Allie
I don’t sleep all night. Not for a single, hazy moment. I cry, my skin sticking to my pillow, my cheeks stinging, as if they’re covered with a thousand little cuts, and I’m both relieved and heartbroken when I smell toast wafting through the corridors from the kitchen.
Breakfast.
The day is here. Milo is leaving and it means everything can go back to normal. But . . . who am I even kidding? Will I ever, ever feel normal again?
He can leave, but I will still be me. I will still be Allie Lake who is in love with Milo Ford. Because, in spite of everything, that is the truth – I love him.
Right now, my heart aches like it’s been stabbed, like it’ll never survive the day.
There’s a tap on the door.
It’s Polly, whose soft voice says, ‘Allie, love, are you all right?’ and then, ‘The helicopter is here.’
*
Milo
When I was a teenager, I watched this TV show.
This kind, warm father saying to his son, ‘Oh, you’ll know when it’s love.
Trust me, you’ll know.’ I remembered it.
Partly because the dad was the kind of dad I wanted.
But, mostly, because I wanted to know. Would I know when love finally arrived for me?
And is this it? Should it feel this bad?
Because I’m in actual physical pain here, sitting on the edge of the dorm bed in the station.
Bed made, sheets tucked tightly. Jameson did it as I got dressed.
He’s in grovelling mode. Feels like shit about just pressing play on that video without checking.
He said he got too excited when we first landed too; that he hoped by the time we both saw what they’d hoped to do, he and Iris, we’d have reconnected, and any apprehension would’ve melted away.
He and Iris knew it was a stretch that Allie would happily be filmed, published on tape, but he’d hoped I might let him edit me in, as his B-story.
‘Slowly coming to the realisation you were wrong about her,’ he said. ‘And in love.’
‘It was inevitable to us,’ he also said, ‘that the only way this trip would end would be for you two to be together.’
I think Allie and I thought the same, eventually.
And God, how wrong can four people be?
I drop my head in my hands, dressed in the coat Allie wrapped herself in in the cabin.
It smells like her. I pick up my phone to a new message.
A message that arrived just before we had to switch off again, from my new publicist, Ella.
A message that feels like it’s from the past. ‘I am so happy for you!’ it says.
‘I’ve got Allie on the list for the ceremony, as your guest.’ And at the end is a heart.
Unpunctured and unbroken. Full and red and whole.
Like it’s taunting me. I messed it up, didn’t I?
We were so close. I just wish I had talked to her, that night in the cabin. I wish, so hard.
Jameson pushes open the door. ‘Hey, man. You good?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Chopper’s here,’ he says sadly. ‘Time to leave.’