Page 66 of Omega’s Forward

Nine-oh-five his time is five past two here. He is either in the air or about to be.

I open messages on my phone. His number is still saved under Callahan, which is how the Bureau’s app entered it and how I never bothered to change it.

There’s nothing in the message thread. We spent two weeks in the same house and never sent each other a single message.

I type out my address. Street, number, the bit about the buzzer being the top button and the top floor being six flights. I delete the part about the flights.

Then I stand there like an idiot with my thumb over the send button while the barge slides out of sight under the bridge.

I send it.

It stays on one tick. Sent, not delivered.

I don’t think he’s blocked me. Not if he’s coming all the way here.

He’s probably on the plane. His phone will be on flight mode, somewhere over the Atlantic.

I go back inside and get into bed and put the phone on the nightstand, screen up, and lie there looking at it. Somewhere over the dark ocean, Brody Callahan is coming to London to find me, and I have just made it easier for him, and I don’t know if I did that because it was sensible or because I wanted to.

At six the sky goes from black to charcoal. I check the phone.

One tick.

I get up and make myself a cup of peppermint tea and take it back to bed with me.

At twenty past seven I check again.

Two ticks.

Delivered. Not read yet. He’s landed, then. Heathrow, wheels down, phone back on, my address arriving on his screen while he’s still in his seat waiting for the doors.

I put the tea down. My hands are not steady, which is ridiculous. He is a man in an airport. He is not in my flat. He is thirty miles away and there is an entire city between us.

At quarter to eight the ticks go blue.

Read.

I stand there and wait for something else to happen. Nothing does. He’s read it.

Ten minutes go by. I’m going to have to decide what to wear and just at a time when half my clothes are suddenly far too tight.

There is no chance I am going to work today. I am suddenly far more nervous than I have any right to be.

It’s stupid. I know Callahan. Intimately. And I made a decision about him.

I don’t want him or anything he stands for.

At eight the phone goes.

I’ll arrive around 11. I think. Still need to work out how the Tube works and how long it takes.

That’s it. Nothing else. No hello. Not one word about anything.

I nearly text back. Piccadilly line, change at Green Park. I get as far as the second word.

I don’t send it. If I start telling him which line to take, I don’t know what I’ll be telling him next.

I go around the flat like someone is coming to value it.