Page 83 of Just for December

‘Yes?’ Daphne asks.

‘I feel like …’ he clarifies slowly. ‘Real life isn’t Ed Sheeran songs and mad airport dashes.’

Daphne blinks.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Cool …’

Duke mulls over the thought. Yeah. She’d said that, right when they’d first met. And then she literally sang an Ed Sheeran song?

‘Real life isn’t Ed Sheeran songs and mad airport dashes …’ he repeats, a little bit louder this time, starting to understand.

‘Duke …?’ starts Daphne, but he’s gone now; his head is somewhere else. He has to get to Evie. He needs to get to her right now this second.

His bags are still in his room – somebody else is taking care of that. He doesn’t even have a coat – just a wallet, passport and phone in his pocket. That’s all he needs, right?

‘Taxi!’ he calls to a passing cab. ‘TAXI!’

43

Duke

Ninety minutes into a cab ride to the airport, the initial adrenaline has worn off and Duke is feeling angsty. One minute he was all,let’s go! Yeah!and the next he’s … well, an hour and a half is an age to get somewhere in order to declare your romantic intentions, once you’ve wasted so much time deciding to actually do it.

He fiddles with his phone nervously, catching up on his texts: Auntie Patricia, just checking in, to Daphne to say no, he’s not there yet, to his publicist in LA to say he’s not sure about a plus-one for the Globes yet, can he go stag? Maybe go with Daphne? What are the optics on that?

‘Home for Christmas?’ his cab driver says, a tank of a man who isn’t afraid of the accelerator.

‘Yeah,’ Duke says, before, inexplicably, correcting: ‘Well, actually … Not right now. This isn’t my flight. This isn’teven my airport. I’m trying to catch somebody else beforetheirflight.’

The driver peers at him in the rearview.

‘Woman?’ he says, his accent heavy in a way that makes him almost intimidating, like Duke had better not even consider withholding the truth from him.

‘A woman, yeah.’ Duke nods, making eye contact with him. The man nods back knowingly. ‘She’s already there, you see, flying to Utah, and Iwasgoing to fly to London, but what’s there, right? So I’ll probably go to LA … I think. I don’t know.’ And then he does something even more startling: he seeks the guy’s advice. He’s babbling nervously. God, why aren’t they here yet? ‘What would you do: London or LA?’

The man shrugs. ‘Nice choices,’ he notes. ‘You must have a nice life.’

‘Yeah, I do,’ he says. ‘You know. Choices are good, right? So many people don’t have choices.’ And then he’s off. ‘This has been a big year for me. The end of this year has been huge. Everything that has come to pass whilst I’ve been in Germany feels like the culmination of years’ worth of work – professionally, but personally, too. You ever had that? That work-life balance thing? We can go too far one way and miss out on what it’s all about, can’t we?’

The driver looks again at him in the mirror. Duke answers for him.

‘Yeah, we can. I haven’t always got it right. I think that’s okay. We’re all learning, aren’t we? That’s the point of it. Where would the fun be if we came here already knowing all the answers?’

‘Love and fishing,’ the driver says. ‘That is my purpose.’

Duke laughs. ‘That’s cool. Yeah. You married?’

The driver takes a hand off the wheel to grab his phone off the passenger seat, showing his wallpaper to be a smiling woman and two tween boys.

‘My reason for everything,’ he says, and Duke peers at the screen.

‘Your family is beautiful,’ he admires, and then he looks out of the window, wistful and deep in thought.

He’s ending the year more sure of who he is and what he wants than ever before: less people-pleasing, less outsourcing his sense of self-worth, more saying no so there’s room for a really big yes … He’s excited. But more than that he’s ready to take himself seriously as a person. As a man. He’s got the career he has through sheer force of will – but it doesn’t keep him warm at night, doesn’t look after him when he’s sick or watch the sun come up over his garden with a fresh pot of coffee. You can’t force that, but he also understands, now, with Evie, that there’s a difference between forcing it when it is wrong and giving it your all when you know it is right. If he doesn’t at least try to give this a go, to spend some proper time with her, he’s a damned fool.

They don’t have to do it on his terms: he sees her. She doesn’t like the limelight, not really. She likes a quiet life. Okay, well, great: he can do quiet. Everything is different now. What got him here won’t get him to where he wants to be, with his own family as his phone’s wallpaper. Things don’t change until you change them. Duke is going to change his priorities. The world might love him – and for that he is truly, honestly, so very grateful – but there’s only one person who truly counts. And now he’s met Evie, he doesn’t see howit can be anyone but her. She’s the first woman to get him, properly, outside of everything else.

‘Five minutes,’ the driver says, and it occurs to Duke, suddenly that he doesn’t have a ticket to get to Evie’s departure gate. He pulls up the departure information on his phone to see which terminal she leaves from. He’ll have to buy a last-minute ticket for the same flight so he can get through security. Easy. Many a problem can be solved with the right credit card.

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