The Cancelled Flight

The departures board flipped Anika Rao's flight to CANCELLED with the small mechanical clatter of a universe that had decided she had not yet suffered enough this weekend. She stood under the board in the small regional airport and watched the word settle and felt the very particular despair of a person who has spent three days being brave at a wedding and now just wants to go home and stop. The wedding had been her cousin's. The wedding had been lovely. The wedding had also contained, for seventy-two continuous hours, the one human being on the planet Anika had structured the last three years of her life around not being in rooms with — and she had done it, she had survived it, she had been gracious and luminous and had not once let her face do anything honest, and the reward for all that excellent face-work was supposed to be a ninety-minute flight and her own flat and a door she could close. CANCELLED. Weather, somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't even here. The next available seat, the airline desk informed her with professional regret, was Tuesday. It was Saturday. Anika was still standing there doing the grim arithmetic of three more nights in a town she had nothing left to be brave in when a voice behind her said, "They've cancelled yours too, then." She did not have to turn around. Three years had not done a single thing to the way that voice landed in her spine. "Don't," Anika said, to the departures board. "Whatever it is. Don't." "I was only going to say," said Daniel Osei, coming to stand beside her, far enough away to be polite, close enough that the politeness was clearly a decision, "that I've got a car." Anika closed her eyes. She knew the geography of this. She had known it the second the board flipped, the way you know the punchline of a joke being told slowly and cruelly just for you. Daniel had driven up for the wedding — Daniel had always driven, Daniel was a man who liked the version of a journey he was in charge of — and Daniel lived, as Anika lived, because they had once lived there together and then divided it like everything else, in the same city, fourteen hours south by road. "No," Anika said. "I haven't asked anything yet." "You've got a car, you're driving home, home is where my home is, and you're about to offer me the passenger seat for fourteen hours. I can see the whole shape of it, Daniel. The answer is no. I'd rather spend three nights sleeping under this departures board." "Okay." He didn't push. That was the maddening thing — he had never, even at the worst of it, been a man who pushed; he just stood there beside the wreckage being calm and reasonable and *present*, which had at various points in their history been the thing she loved most about him and the thing she could not forgive. "Okay. I just — I'm leaving in twenty minutes either way. If you change your mind, I'm in the short-stay car park, level two. Silver one. You'd know it." A pause. "It'd get you home tonight, Anika. That's all the offer is. Not a — not anything. Just fourteen hours and your own bed at the end of it." He left. He didn't linger, didn't make it heavy, just walked off toward the car park with his weekend bag, and Anika stood under the CANCELLED sign and hated, with a clean and total passion, every single fact currently arranged around her. Because here was the truth she was not saying to the departures board: it was not that she couldn't bear to be in a car with Daniel Osei. It was that she was afraid she could. It was that fourteen hours was exactly long enough — and a car was exactly small enough, and the dark of a motorway at night was exactly forgiving enough — to finally have the conversation that three years of careful face-work had been specifically, expensively designed to prevent. You could avoid someone forever in a city. You could not avoid them in a Volkswagen. Anika looked at the board. Tuesday. Three nights of being brave in a town that had run out of things for her to be brave at. She thought about her own flat, and her own door, and the ninety-minute flight that no longer existed. She picked up her bag. Level two of the short-stay car park was cold and concrete and echoing, and the silver car was exactly where he'd said, and Daniel was leaning against it, not looking surprised, which she also hated, and Anika walked up to him with her chin at the angle she'd been holding it for seventy-two hours and said, "Three rules. One, you don't get to bring up anything from before unless I bring it up first. Two, I control the music. Three —" and here her voice did something small that she could not entirely manage, the first honest thing her face had done all weekend — "three, if this turns into the conversation, the big one, you don't get to be calm about it. I cannot do fourteen hours of you being reasonable at me, Daniel. If we're going to do this, you have to actually be in it." Daniel looked at her for a long moment in the cold concrete light. Then he opened the passenger door. "Deal," he said. "Get in. It's a long way round."