My father was right. I deserved to spend the rest of my life alone.
I spent the rest of the semester moping. All the way up until we handed out the grades on the last day of the semester. That night, I finally agreed to meet Drew and Mindy at the Bird and Baby for drinks. It was cold, snow falling heavier than ever outside the pub windows. We bundled up near the fire.
“I’m buying,” Drew insisted. “It’s a special occasion. First time we’ve seen Jack’s face in . . . well, we forget how long, that’s how long it’s been.”
“Drew, be nice.” Mindy aimed a kick at him under the table. “Jack’s been mourning.”
I had. But not for the reason they assumed. “What have I missed?” I asked, and I let Mindy fill me in on all the gossip with her friends, until Drew returned with the first round, and filled me in on all the gossip he’d overheard tending bar for our colleagues as well.
“Hannah seems . . . not good,” he ventured after our third round.
“I wouldn’t know,” I reply, downing the whiskey. “One more set?” I skipped to the bar, hoping to avoid this conversation. But as I turned to bring our third set of whiskeys back from the bar, I glanced across the room and noticed a familiar face.
That punk kid who’d had his arm slung around Harper, the last time I saw her in here. He was sitting with Mary Kate and another girl I didn’t recognize. Harper’s friends. Only, no Harper this time.
I returned to our seats, swallowed half my fourth whiskey, and cleared my throat. “I’ve been sleeping with a student,” I said, just to get the worst of it over with.
Mindy gaped at me.
Drew looked torn about whether he should high-five me or scowl, for Mindy’s sake.
I just swilled the liquid remaining in my glass and stared at it so I wouldn’t have to see their expressions while I talked. “At first it was an accident. Then it became a repeated accident. Then I realized that . . . I mean, I actually started to . . . ” I closed my eyes. This was idiotic.
But I needed to tell someone, and I clearly couldn’t have told Harper, who replied to any emails I sent with a blank email, if she replied at all.
“I think I love her.”
After that, Mindy dragged the whole story from me. The trip to the Cotswolds, her staying over at my place. The funeral. Hannah seeing me there with Harper. Me and Hannah fighting. Me taking it out on Harper.
“But you never apologized after that?” Mindy raised an eyebrow at me.
“Of course I did. I emailed her every day afterward saying I was sorry.”
Mindy actually rolled her eyes. “That’s not apologizing, Jack. That’s an email.”
And right then, it dawned on me what I needed to do.
It took me a while to convince Harper’s friends to tell me when her plane was leaving. The next day, it turned out. From London Heathrow.
“Promise if you do this, you really mean it,” Mary Kate told me as I stood to leave their table.
“I swear,” I told her. “I really, really mean it.”
Back at my place, I sobered up in a cold shower and set my alarm for my usual break-of-dawn. It would leave me five hours to make it to the airport. Plenty of time.
I hadn’t planned on London traffic.
By the time I made it to the Heathrow security gates, I only had two hours left. Still plenty of time.
But security insisted I couldn’t go through without a ticket, not even to meet someone on an international flight who needed help speaking English (okay I may have fibbed a little). I wound up buying the cheapest flight I could find, a flight over to Cardiff on a puddle hopper, and then I joined the endless security queue.
By the time I made it through, I had half an hour left. Her flight was listed on the boards, and it still said boarding.
I ran. Really ran. Harder than I’ve ever run before. But by the time I reached the terminal, they were announcing the final boarding call, and the gate stood empty. I asked at security, begged them to let me onto the plane to see if my nephew had wandered onto it by mistake (okay maybe a lot of fibbing). No dice.
So I sat in Heathrow airport clutching a ticket to Cardiff, and I watched her plane home take off.
Then I came up with Plan B. Took a week off work, bought a much bigger plane ticket than the little puddle hopper to Cardiff, and set about researching tickets for the Philadelphia Orchestra.
I never actually expected it to work. I never expected her to speak to me again—it’s why I sent the dress and the ticket instead of showing up at her door (Mary Kate came in handy yet again—turns out the pen pals still exchange real snail mail letters on the regular, and are very useful people to know when you, say, need to take a guess at someone’s dress size).