Davey, it’s been almost three hours. I don’t want to leave but I don’t think you’re here, so I’m going to start making my way home. I’ll keep watching my phone. Call me and I’ll come back. Did you miss your flight?
He’s obviously missed it. Hope sinks at how strange all of this is. I don’t know what to think. So instead I head toward the train station and prepare to step back out into the January cold and, in a daze, reluctantly I go home.
—
It takes me an hour and a half to get to my flat, and my phone dings intermittently as I fall in and out of signal.
Miranda cannot stop asking for information. Ordinarily I’d find this cute, encouraging—the stuff of which good best friends are made—but now I wish she’d stop. She doesn’t know what’s happened and I need her to stop the romantic GIFs of couples kissing. I tell her,His flight was delayed. I’ll call with news tomorrow.I hope this isn’t a lie. I hope when I message her back tomorrow I do have actual news of Davey. Or that he’s arrived, is with me,asleep, his long legs draped over the side of my small two-person sofa while he gives in to his jet lag.
The rest of the day passes in a haze. My flat is spotless already and so, instead of cleaning for something to do, I sit there nursing a cup of tea, reluctant to reply to messages, reluctant to do anything. I don’t even turn on the TV to look out for dreadful news of mid-air collisions. His plane didn’t crash. It landed. Only Davey wasn’t on it.
I message him again. I am 99.9 percent sure there is going to be a solid reason why he wasn’t on that flight. I just need to know what it is. There’s no point sugar-coating my desperation to find out what’s happened, so I go in with,Please tell me what’s going on. Please tell me where you are.
He doesn’t ever update his social media, but I go and take a look anyway at his near-dormant accounts across the various platforms, to see if he’s posted anything. He hasn’t. But he’s been tagged in a few images of leaving drinks and New Year’s Eve. And that’s it. In these scant pictures he looks happy, smiling, holding a drink in one photo and not in the other—his arm around someone, who I guess must be Grant, although Grant’s not been tagged. I click off. There are no answers to be found here.
I lie in bed and at 11P.M.I video-call him. It’s a last-ditch effort. He doesn’t pick up. I lie awake for hours in a stunned daze until finally, as the birds begin their effortless song outside my window, I fall asleep.
—
My phone alarm is still set for work. I forgot to turn it off. I’ve had about three hours’ sleep and my eyes are tinged red and stinging. I always leave my phone on, so my parents can get hold of me if anything drastic happens overnight; and I would, normally, wake up if it rang, so I know…I just know there’s nothing on there. I’ve taken the day off work today so that I could spend it withDavey. I toy with the idea of getting dressed, going to work anyway, clawing back this day that was supposed to be so precious. Clare will amend my HR file easily enough so that I can use the holiday another time. I have nothing else to do, so I go through the rigmarole of putting on work clothes, brushing my teeth; I put makeup on my face, automatically applying each item. I don’t buy a coffee on the way to the station. I don’t have it in me to go through every single part of my day the way I normally would, and when I’m on the train I regret this bitterly. I’m exhausted, drained, a mix of totally emotional and utterly emotionless.
As I emerge from the station I can’t wait any longer. If Davey’s still in Texas, which is what I assume, then it will be the middle of the night for him. He didn’t answer me yesterday. Why would he now, in the middle of the night? A thought enters my head. If I’ve been stood up, then this is a nasty way of doing it. What if he saw me at the airport and then dodged me—decided I wasn’t what I appeared from the safety of video calls, exited, and is now in his flat in Brixton?
As a form of restrained anger, I send him:I am now a mixture of pissed off and worried about you. Please put me out of my misery. If you’re not coming, could you just say.There’s really nothing I can add to this and so I hit send, go to work, and prepare to stare at my screen for most of the day, fielding questions about why I’m there when I said I was taking a day off. None of them know about Davey. I’m certainly not telling them now.
Clare knows something’s amiss and her eyes search my very red, bloodshot ones, looking for the words I’m not saying. But with so many people in the office to overhear our every word if they want to, she accepts that I’m here and that I’m working, sort of, and because she knows something’s out of the ordinary, she doesn’t try to drum into me whatever the strange HR rules are that say you can’t mess around with your holiday dates once theform has been processed. It’s only Clare who processes them and, in the state I’m in, I think she’s decided to give that chat a miss.
My mobile dings with a text message five minutes later when I’m at my desk and I fall on it. It’s Clare, which makes me laugh a strange, shocked, hollow kind of noise.
What’s happened?she demands.You look like shit. You sound like shit. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be at home? Just sneak out—I won’t tell anyone. As long as you delete this message.
I tell her thanks, but no. I’m staying. I can’t sit in my flat staring at the walls. He’s not coming. I know that now. But I don’t know why.
—
At home at the end of the day I finally eat something. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. I butter two slices of bread and devour them, ravenously, standing up in my kitchen.
And then my phone rings and I look at it, expecting it to be Miranda yet again or any number of people, but not the one I want it to be. But it is the one I want it to be. It is Davey. I drop the plate I’m holding onto the counter so hard it clatters, and I swipe.
“Davey,” I announce into the phone. “Where are you?”
It’s quiet at the other end and I wait, the sound of my breath and his converging into one.
“It’s so good to hear your voice,” he says. He sounds down, and my stomach twists and turns the bread I’ve just eaten.
“Davey,” I say again. “Where are you? Where have you been?”
He gives a sad, short sigh. “Hannah…”
“Yes, what? What is it?”
“I’m at the hospital.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t even know how to tell you,” he begins. And I pull out my kitchen chair. I feel weak, I need to sit.
“Tell me,” I prompt.
