Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?
The novel opens with a Prologue in which seventeen-year-old protagonist Hadley Sullivan has arrived at the airport to catch a very important flight to London. In her mind she goes over all the things which could have gone differently up to the moment of arrival. She might have been delayed a little by having to run back inside the house to retrieve a book she forgot. And then there was procrastination involved in trying on a dress. If she had tried it on earlier, she would realized earlier that it needed a little alteration and that alteration wouldn’t have cost her precious time, either. These and other slight obstructions occurred which served to keep her from getting to the airport on time and that doesn’t even include the built-in expectation that flights never take off on schedule anyway. Except, of course, they do. Some plans take off right on schedule, anyway. And much to her Hadley’s chagrin, it just so happens that her flight to London is one of those times. Even with all fate conspiring the way it did, she still managed to get to the airport just four minutes late. But when a plane leaves on schedule, one might as well show up the next day. The events of the Prologue lead to this final line of the section which sets up everything which is to follow as an exploration of the nature of fate and destiny.
She backs up against a wall and sets down her things, forgetting even to worry about the crush of people. Her mind is too busy with the possibilities. It could have been anything, really. His line could have taken longer. He could have been held up at customs. He might have emerged earlier and assumed that she’d gone ahead. They could have crossed paths and not even noticed.
He might simply have left.
That four-minute delay creates the consequence of needing to quickly find a seat on the next flight to London. The consequence of taking this later flight is a seat situated next to a very good-looking British teenager named Oliver. He has been in the states studying at Yale but is on his way home for a much-needed vacation. Resistant to his attention at first, Hadley is soon enough drawn into deep conversation with Oliver and before she even realizes it, the plane is preparing to land. Had this been a flight from New York to Los Angeles or Chicago to Miami, landing would be the beginning of a whirlwind romance. Perhaps not a long-lasting one, but certainly something to remember and treasure forever. But this a flight from across the Atlantic from one country to another. Therefore, landing doesn’t mean simply collecting bags from the carousel and hailing a cab. Landing means going through customs. And customs in the London airport means all EU citizens line up to the right while everybody else lines up to the left. After finally working her way through the serpentine time-eater that is non-EU customs, she comes out the other side with no sign at all of Oliver. As with the arrival at the airport back in America, fate seems to be playing a little game with Hadley.
“People who meet in airports are seventy-two percent more likely to fall for each other than people who meet anywhere else.”
Oliver has a habit of expressing statistical possibilities that somehow just don’t seem quite right. For instance, one of the first things he says to Hadley while on the plane is that almost one-quarter of all mayonnaise is laced with vanilla ice cream. That sounds more like wishful thinking than well-conducted research. On the other hand, he asserts that eighty-eight percent of all personal income earned in England goes “straight to the Queen” which seems far more believable. A connective line can be traced directly from the little game that fate has been playing on Hadley inside airports on two different continents to Oliver’s obsession with statistical figures. After all, statistical analysis is one of things human devised to foster a sense of control over the random quality of fate. The final image of the book in which Hadley decides to simply say silent and put faith in Oliver’s final calculation—that people who meet each other on three separate occasions during any twenty-hour period are ninety-eight percent more likely to meet again—rather than pointing out the absurdity of his claims. This change of tactic is suggestive of the way that cold hard logic and blind faith work in similar ways on the issue of destiny. It is a probably a wise decision since nearly one hundred percent of couples in novels who meet on airplanes and survive to the final page wind up together.
