The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight(34)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

He lowers his eyes.

“I didn’t realize,” she says again. “I’m so sorry.”

He nods at the stone bench a few feet away, the rough surface still damp from the earlier rain. They walk over together, heads bowed, the mournful sound of an organ starting up inside the church. Just as she’s about to sit, Oliver motions for her to wait, then whips his jacket off and lays it on the bench.

“Your dress,” he says by way of explanation, and Hadley glances down at herself, frowning at the purple silk as if she’s never seen it before. Something about the gesture cracks her heart open further, the idea that he’d think of something so trivial at a time like this; doesn’t he know she couldn’t care less about the stupid dress? That she’d gladly curl up on the grass for him, make a bed out of the dirt?

Unable to find the words to refuse him, she sits down, brushing her fingers along the soft folds of his jacket. Oliver stands above her, rolling up first one sleeve and then the other, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the garden.

“Do you need to get back?” Hadley asks, and he shrugs, leaving a few inches between them as he joins her on the bench.

“Probably,” he says, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

But he doesn’t move, and after a moment Hadley finds herself pitched forward as well, both of them studying the grass at their feet with unnatural intensity. She feels she probably owes him some sort of explanation for showing up here, but he doesn’t ask for one, so they just remain there like that, the silence stretching between them.

Back home in Connecticut, there’s a bird bath just outside her kitchen window, which Hadley used to look out at while doing the dishes. The most frequent visitors were a pair of sparrows who used to fight for their turn, one hopping around the edge and chirping loudly as the other bathed, and then vice versa. Occasionally one would dart at the other, and both would flap their wings and lurch backward again, making ripples in the water. But although they generally spent the entire time squabbling, they always arrived together, and they always left together.

One morning she was surprised to see only one of the birds. It landed lightly on the stone lip of the bath and danced around the edge without touching the water, rotating its rounded head this way and that with a sense of bewilderment so pitiful that Hadley had leaned to the window and peered up at the sky, though she knew it would be empty.

There’s something of that in Oliver now, a reckless confusion that makes him seem more lost than sad. Hadley’s never been this close to death before. The only three missing branches of her own family tree belong to grandparents who died before she was born, or when she was too little to mark their absence. Somehow, she’d always expected this sort of grief to resemble something from a movie, all streaming tears and choking sobs. But here in this garden, there’s no shaking of fists at the sky; nobody has fallen to their knees, and nobody is cursing the heavens.

Instead, Oliver looks like he might throw up. There’s a grayish tinge to his face, a lack of color that’s all the more startling against his dark suit, and he blinks at her without expression. His eyes have a wounded look, like he’s been hurt somewhere but can’t quite locate the source of the pain, and he pulls in a ragged breath.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says eventually.

“No,” Hadley says, shaking her head. “I’m sorry I just assumed….”

They fall quiet again.

After a moment, Oliver sighs. “This is a little weird, right?”

“Which part?”

“I don’t know,” he says with a small smile. “You showing up at my father’s funeral?”

“Oh,” she says. “That.”

He reaches down and yanks a few blades of grass from the ground, tearing at them absently. “Really, though, it’s the whole thing. I think maybe the Irish had it right, turning it into a celebration. Because this kind of thing”—he jerks his chin in the direction of the church—“this kind of thing is completely mad.”

Beside him, Hadley picks at the hem of her dress, unsure what to say.

“Not that there’d be much to celebrate anyway,” he says bitterly, letting the pieces of grass flutter back to the ground. “He was a complete arse. No use pretending otherwise now.”

Hadley looks up in surprise, but Oliver seems relieved.

“I’ve been thinking that all morning,” he says. “For the last eighteen years, really.” He looks at her and smiles. “You’re sort of dangerous, you know?”

She stares at him. “Me?”

“Yeah,” he says, sitting back. “I’m way too honest with you.”

A small bird lands on the fountain in the middle of the garden, and they watch as it pecks at the stone in vain. There’s no water there, only a cracked layer of dirt, and after a moment the bird flies away again, turns into a distant speck in the sky.

“How did it happen?” Hadley asks quietly, but Oliver doesn’t answer; he doesn’t even look at her. Through the fruit trees lining the fence, she can see people beginning to walk to their cars, dark as shadows. Above them the sky has gone flat and gray again.

After a moment he clears his throat. “How was the wedding?”

“What?”

“The wedding. How did it go?”

She shrugs. “Fine.”

“Come on,” he says with a pleading look, and Hadley sighs.

“Turns out, Charlotte’s nice,” she offers, folding her hands in her lap. “Annoyingly nice.”

Oliver grins, looking more like the version of himself she met on the plane. “What about your dad?”

“He seems happy,” she tells him, her voice thick. She can’t bring herself to mention the baby, as if speaking of it might somehow make it so. Instead, she remembers the book, and reaches for the bag beside her. “I didn’t return it.”

He glances over, his eyes coming to rest on the cover.

“I read a little on the way over,” she says. “It’s actually kind of good.”

Oliver reaches for it, thumbing the pages as he’d done on the plane. “How’d you find me, anyway?”

“Someone was talking about a funeral in Paddington,” she says, and Oliver flinches at the word funeral. “And I don’t know. I just had a feeling.”

He nods, gently shutting the book again. “My father had a first edition of this one,” he says, his mouth twisting into a frown. “He kept it on a high shelf in his study, and I remember always staring up at it as a kid, knowing it was worth a lot.”