The drive to the airport was torture. Mia’s thoughts kept circling back to how meaningless everything she once held dear had become, how untetheredshehad become. She didn’t need to think too hard on why Wyatt up and left so abruptly. While she never thought he’d give up the position as head of the hub over an affair that ended badly, Mia wished she had a safe place to escape to as well.
Wyatt had a home to go back to, with or without Mia. He had a solid sense of belonging, something she had tried to earn her entire life and failed miserably.
“Miss?” The driver’s voice from right next to her forced Mia back to reality, and she blinked a few times, looked at her surroundings and realized she was at the airport, and that the driver had unloaded her luggage and opened the door for her to exit.
She’d been lost in her own thoughts for almost two hours.
“Thank you,” she said to the driver, pulling out a bill and handing it to him as a tip.
“Much obliged.” The driver smiled and closed the back door before returning to the driver’s seat and heading off.
Mia spent a few more seconds staring at the sliding doors of Heathrow before extending her trolley's handle and forcing herself to walk into the terminal. The flight logs showed hers hadn’t begun check-in yet, which she’d expected considering how early it was.
With a sigh, Mia made her way through the people hurrying to their lines. Families, businesspeople, young men and women—all of them full of a sort of buzz that people tended to adopt right before a flight. Mia couldn’t drum up the same sort of energy, though. She felt more in tune with the cashier who took her coffee and croissant order and the barista who served her, both seemed disinterested in anything but getting this part of their day over with. Like Mia, they weren’t there to go anywhere exciting.
Mia spent the next hour in a mild attempt to drown her thoughts, first in work and then in a book. She’d never had trouble immersing herself in research and she usually got lost in her books, but after almost sixty minutes of her mind wandering back to Wyatt and the knowledge that she’ll probably never see him again, Mia gave up.
Instead, she ordered another coffee and listened to people’s conversations. Most of them were mundane, but they proved a more useful distraction than her earlier attempts.
Mia was just starting to get invested in an argument the woman sitting two tables behind her was having over the phone with whom Mia assumed was her husband, when a man in a suit sat at the table next to her and answered a call on his phone.
She wouldn’t have given him a second look, except that the second sentence out of his mouth grabbed her attention immediately.
“I should be back in Boston in about twelve hours, maybe less.” He paused to listen to the response on the other end of the line. “Yes, I’ve got the paperwork on me, I’ll come straight to the office. Just make sure there’s a car waiting for me.” Another short pause. “British Airways, flight BA0213.”
Mia looked up at the outbound flights board. The next flight to Boston was direct and set to leave in less than four hours. Her train of thought defied all logic. Wyatt left, she broke his heart, and he wanted nothing to do with her. Spontaneously jumping on a flight wouldn’t change that, but Mia already had her phone in hand and the British Airways website uploaded.
After a quick search, she was relieved to find that there were still tickets available for flight BA0213. They were for first class and would cost her a pretty penny, which did nothing to stop Mia from booking one as quickly as possible before it also disappeared.
It was a risk, a leap of faith that she’d even manage to locate Wyatt, let alone have him agree to speak with her, but it was the only course of action that made sense. She just hoped she wasn’t too late.
The Grand Gesture
Wyatt
“Hey, kiddo.”Wyatt looked up from his papers with a smile at the nickname his dad refused to give up no matter how old Wyatt was.
“I’m twenty-eight, Dad.”
“So? Doesn’t make you any less my kid.” His dad sat next to him on the couch, picking up one of the papers he was working on and examining it. “Where is everyone?”
“Mom went shopping with Riri, Ky is having lunch with the girls, and I have no idea where Reed took off to. He seemed pretty hell-bent, though, wherever he was going.”
“That boy, he reminds me of your aunt at that age, always on a mission to save the world.” His dad laughed ruefully, running his hand through his dark brown hair sprinkled with white. “How about you? We haven’t had much time to talk since you got back from Oxford, everything going okay there?”
“Yeah, the lab is great, the people are great, the weather–not so much, but I do rock those trench coats.”
“Meet anyone interesting?” Brian Jenkins was many things, a good actor wasn’t one of them.
Wyatt raised an eyebrow, not fooled for a second by his father’s attempt to seem nonchalant. “Kylie told you about Mia?”
“No, she told your mom about Mia.”
“Ah, so, same-same.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Nope, I just want to wrap up my work in Oxford and come back home.”