The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight Read Free Page B

not the changes that will break your heart; it’s that tug of familiarity.
    And so she’d chickened out, instead spending those first two days watching and waiting, trying to read the lines of his face like a map, searching for clues to explain why their little family had so abruptly fallen apart. When he’d gone off to England the previous fall, they’d all been thrilled. Until then he’d been a professor at a small mid-tier college in Connecticut, so the idea of a fellowship at Oxford—which boasted one of the best literature departments in the world—had been irresistible. But Hadley had been just about to start her sophomore year, and Mom couldn’t leave her little wallpaper shop for four whole months, so it was decided that they’d stay behind until Christmas, when they’d join him in England for a couple of weeks of sightseeing, and then they’d all return home together.
    That, of course, never happened.
    At the time, Mom had simply announced that there was a change of plans, that they’d be spending Christmas at Hadley’s grandparents’ house in Maine instead. Hadley half believed her dad would be there to surprise her when they arrived, but on Christmas Eve, it was only Grandma and Pops and enough presents to confirm that everyone was trying to make up for the absence of something else.
    For days before that, Hadley had been overhearing her parents’ tension-filled phone calls and listening to the sound of her mother crying through the vents of their old house, but it wasn’t until the drive home from Maine that Mom finally announced that she and Dad would be splitting up, and that he’d be staying on for another semester at Oxford.
    “It’ll just be a separation at first,” she said, sliding her eyes from the road over to where Hadley sat numbly, absorbing the news one incremental thought at a time—first,
Mom and Dad are getting divorced
, and then,
Dad isn’t coming back
.
    “There’s a whole ocean between you,” she said quietly. “How much more separated can you get?”
    “Legally,” Mom said with a sigh. “We’re going to
legally
separate.”
    “Don’t you need to see each other first? Before deciding something like that?”
    “Oh, honey,” Mom said, taking a hand off the wheel to give Hadley’s knee a little pat. “I think it’s already been decided.”
    And so, just two months later, Hadley stood in the bathroom of their Aspen hotel, her toothbrush in hand, as her dad’s voice drifted in from the next room. A moment earlier she’d been sure it was Mom calling to check in, and her heart had lifted at the thought. But then she heard him say a name—
Charlotte
—before lowering his voice again.
    “No, it’s fine,” he said. “She’s just in the loo.”
    Hadley felt suddenly cold all over, wondering when her father had become the kind of man to call the bathroom a “loo,” to whisper to foreign women on hotel phones, to take his daughter on a ski trip as if it meant something, as if it were a promise, and then return to his new life like it had never even happened.
    She took a step closer to the door, her bare feet cold on the tiles.
    “I know,” he was saying now, his voice soft. “I miss you, too, honey.”
    Of course
, Hadley thought, closing her eyes.
Of course
.
    It didn’t help that she was right; when had that ever made anything better? She felt a tiny seed of resentment take root inside of her. It was like the pit of a peach, something small and hard and mean, a bitterness she was certain would never dissolve.
    She stepped back from the door, feeling her throat go tight and her rib cage swell. In the mirror, she watched the color rise up into her cheeks, and her eyes felt blurred by the heat of the small room. She wrapped her fingers around the edge of the sink, watching her knuckles go white, forcing herself to wait until he was off the phone.
    “What’s wrong?” Dad asked when she finally emerged from the bathroom, walked straight past him without a