My grateful smile wobbled and was gone before he even saw it. I was already pulling on clothes for my long journey home as he headed to the kitchen to make coffee that I doubted there’d be time to drink.
*
Fifteen minutes later I was standing beside a bulging suitcase that was probably over the weight limitandfilled with all the wrong clothes. It didn’t matter. Amelia and I were the same size. I could borrow anything I needed from her.
‘Passport? Charge cards? Cell phone?’ Jeff asked, eyeing the tote bag slung over my shoulder.
I nodded. We’d not spoken much as I’d raced through the apartment, binning the perishables in my fridge and scribbling a note to slip beneath the super’s door on my way out. I had no idea how long I’d be away and when Jeff asked what I was going to do about work, I’d looked at him as though he was speaking a foreign language. Work hadn’t even crossed my mind, not the way it would certainly do his if our situation was reversed. ‘I’ll call them and explain when I land,’ I said, reaching for my laptop almost as an afterthought and shoving it into my hand luggage.
‘Shit timing, what with the job offer and everything,’ he said.
The look I threw him spoke volumes. Family was everything to me, something Jeff had never really understood.
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ I said, with a confidence that could well be misplaced. Working as an editor in the US was very different from working as one in the UK, and opportunities like the one I’d just been offered at work were rare.
My building’s rickety elevator, which took perverse pleasure in terrorising the residents, juddered alarmingly as it took us down to street level. I kept my eyes riveted on the gauge throughout the descent. Do not break down. Not tonight. Not now.It was good advice for both the temperamental lift and me. It delivered us to the foyer with a bone-jarring shudder.
I scarcely noticed the cold night air biting my cheeks as we hurried down the steep steps to the street. ‘The intersection’s probably your best bet for getting a cab,’ Jeff announced, lifting my suitcase free of the frozen snow coating the pavement.
I peered through the falling flurries for a canary-yellow taxi, the kind that had so delighted me when I’d first moved to New York, as though I hadn’t really expected them to exist outside of films and TV shows.
‘There’s one!’ I cried, breaking into an unnecessary run that the smooth soles of my boots couldn’t cope with.
‘Mind the sidewalk!’
Jeff’s warning cry came too late to stop my feet from pinwheeling like a cartoon character before flying out from beneath me. I landed on the icy surface with the kind of force that was going to have left a bruise. But it wasn’t pain that brought the tears to my eyes. It was the unrelenting anxiety, and a feeling of foreboding so thick it was practically suffocating. I scrabbled back to my feet with the speed of a fallen figure skater.
‘You okay?’ Jeff asked, a hand already raised to hail one of the many cabs passing through the intersection. Just as he’d predicted. I’d lived here for four years but I’d never felt less like a New Yorker than I did tonight.
I gave the driver my destination and watched as he hefted my weighty case into the boot of the taxi.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Jeff asked, and I spun so fast to face him I almost landed on the ground again.
‘Really?’ I asked, the tears I was fighting to keep at bay already blurring my vision at the generosity of his offer. ‘You’d do that?’ There was an awkward silence followed by a race to see which one of us would realise my mistake first. ‘Oh, I see. You mean to the airport.’
Stupid, stupid, stupid.I berated myself, knowing I’d not been quick enough to wipe the disappointment from my face.Of courseJeff wasn’t offering to get on a plane and travel three and a half thousand miles across the Atlantic with me. Our relationship was too on-again/off-again for that kind of commitment.
‘Or I could just catch a cab from here back to mine,’ he completed lamely.
The driver, who’d finished stowing my case, flashed me a look of sympathy. Even total strangers could see that Jeff and I were not going to go the distance. Why was it taking us so long to see that too?
‘Thank you. It’d be nice to have some company on the ride.’
‘No problem,’ Jeff said, holding my elbow as I climbed into the back of the cab. ‘We can go through the flight options I found.’
I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have during the forty-minute drive to the airport. Iyep-ed anduh-huh-ed a lot as Jeff listed the various routes he’d found online, but my eyes kept sliding to the cab windows where New York was currently disappearing under a blanket of snow. Had it been this cold on the beach where my sister had been found? Can a healthy, otherwise strong, thirty-nine-year-old woman bounce back from hypothermia? And what had driven her out into the night in the first place?
Those unanswerable questions were still running through my head as we pulled up outside the Departures terminal. Before I could reach for my purse, Jeff was already settling the fare. It was a nice gesture and I refused to think he was doing so out of guilt.
‘Good luck,’ said the driver, lifting my case from his cab and setting it on the pavement beside me. I chose to believe he meant for my journey home rather than in my relationship.
The city that never sleeps had lived up to its reputation on the roads, and things were just as busy in the bustling airport terminal. I already knew from Jeff’s search that I was five hours too early for a direct flight, but I was happy to take anything that would shave even minutes off my arrival time in London.
Jeff was tall and broad, a college football player who used his former skills to carve a swathe through the crowds to the airline desk. We got there without colliding with a single wheeled case or piled-high trolley. The good news was that there wasn’t a queue ahead of me; the bad, this was because there were hardly any flight options left for me to take.
‘Maybe youshouldwait for a direct flight?’ Jeff suggested, his handsome brow creased in a frown after listening to the zigzag route through the skies that the airline rep had just proposed. ‘You might even snag a seat in Business if you hang on.’
Was that the moment when I realised that a shared love of Chinese food, art-house films and pretty amazing sex wasn’t going to be enough to keep us together for the rest of our lives? Jeff was an only child, and not particularly close to his parents, either geographically or emotionally, while I was at the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I might live thousands of miles from Amelia and Mum, but the ties that bound me to them had never felt stronger than they did right now.
