Page 110 of The Wake-Up Call

“Go seize the day, my little pigeon. My romance-loving heart could really do with a happy ending right now.”

I can hear the smile in Jem’s voice.

“I’ll do my best to deliver,” I promise her, “and kill as few pheasants as possible in the process.”

“Atta girl.”

•••••

In all my wild imaginings of how this airport chase is going to go, I’ve been envisaging it likeLove ActuallyorFriends.Sprinting through crowds, shouting Lucas’s name, desperate to find him.

I had forgotten what Bournemouth Airport is like.

It’s basically one room. There’s no queue for security—it’s all very calm. Slightly wrong-footed, I approach the woman checking tickets and passports.

“Hi! I don’t have a ticket! I’m here to tell a man I love him!”

She eyes me. “Roger,” she calls, without looking away. “We’ve got another one!”

Roger appears from somewhere, hitching up his belt. He is very large and looks very bored.

“May I start by saying, do not try to push past me,” Roger says. “I will catch you immediately and escort you to Bournemouth police station.”

If asking politely doesn’t work, pushing past the security guard is my plan B, so this is a blow.

“Now, which flight is this gentleman on?”

“To Rio de Janeiro!” I say breathlessly.

“Via Faro, then,” Roger says. He checks his watch. “You’re very late,” he says, displeased.

“I know! But—can I just go through and speak to him?”

“No,” says Roger.

“Please?”

This does seem to placate him slightly. Maybe the romantic-declaration types aren’t usually big on pleases and thank-yous.

“You can’t go through without a ticket.”

“Can I buy a ticket to somewhere? Where’s cheap?” I say, looking around wildly at the self-check-in machines.

“Do you have your passport?” asks the woman at the desk.

“Oh. No.”

“Then no, you can’t buy a ticket,” she says.

I shift from foot to foot. “What can I do?”

They both regard me steadily. They are ruining my momentum here. That flight is boarding right now, and they are talking soslowly.

“Look,” I say, pulling the Christmas card out of my back pocket. “Here. Last year, I wrote this card for the man I love, to tell him how I feel about him. I really put my heart on the line. And then Ithoughthe read the card and laughed at it and kissed my flatmate under the mistletoe instead. But he didn’t! The card went to the wrong person, because people are really crap at reading handwritten notes, and I’ve been torturing this lovely man all year because I thought he was a dickhead and hewasn’t.”

“Your handwriting is awful,” Roger observes. “Is that supposed to be a C?”

“Aww,cosy warm heart,” says the woman. “That’s sweet.”

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