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  For Ben, the one on the other end of my red thread.

  An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, and circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle. But it will never break.

  —ancient Chinese proverb

  chapter one

  To Noelle. My girl. My best friend.

  Here it is. A letter from past me, to future you. God, it’s so strange writing this, knowing fifteen years from now, you’re actually going to be reading these words. The Future Noelle Butterby! I wonder where you’ll be, and who you’ll end up becoming. I suppose that’s what this is for—to write down our predictions and hopes for each other. (And you’d better have put Leo DiCaprio in my letter, Elle, and not just a date and a measly kiss goodnight either. I’m talking sweaty car scene in Titanic, with added Boyz II Men songs and less iceberg-related deaths, obviously.)

  Now. On to my hopes for you, Future Noelle, and I have plenty.

  Firstly, I hope you’re so busy that you almost forget to come tonight—to be there when they take the time capsule out of the ground. I hope you arrive straight off a plane from… LA, maybe? Indonesia? Oh! What about Queensland, land of hot scuba diving instructors? Well. Wherever it is, all I know is you’ll be so well-traveled that your kids will be named after cool, faraway villages nobody’s heard of and you’ll be the sort to slip into French mid-conversation “by accident.”

  Secondly, I hope your life is full of love. Yeah, yeah, I know, classic cliché, classic me, but I do. Bursting with it! Butterflies, goose bumps, can’t-eat, make-you-puke love. I’d mention your soul mate—the one on the other end of your red thread—but I don’t want to make your eyes roll so much they get stuck in the back of your head, because you want to be able to look at the man. Because he’ll be totally hot. A charmer too. And so tall, he’ll give you a neck ache. Maybe he’ll even have to shop for special shoes because his feet will be that big. Only the best for you, my friend. Just wait and see.

  I hope you find that job that doesn’t feel like work.

  I hope you eventually nail the pizza dough recipe we screw up every single weekend.

  I hope you ride that hot-air balloon, that you spend a summer night sleeping outside somewhere under the stars (no tents). I hope you take that all-night sleeper train. But mostly, I hope you’re happy, Noelle Butterby. That by now, you see what I see—all that power and kindness and light—and you’ve let it rip from inside you. Shown the world that you are here.

  And lastly (because the size of the paper and envelope they’ve given us is so small, it’s an actual joke), I hope wherever we are, we’ll keep on talking to each other, no matter what. And remember, at least when we can’t be together, we just have to close our eyes and pretend.

  Love you, Noelle.

  Always,

  Daisy x

  * * *

  I’m not exactly sure where I thought I’d be at this moment in time. If you’d asked me fifteen years ago, said, “So, Noelle, where do you think you’ll be on March the ninth, fifteen years from now?” I’m sure I’d have probably said something like, “happy, settled down,” or “like something out of those Park Christmas catalog adverts, I expect. You know. Nice house, smiling sweater-wearing husband, one of those posh corner sofas.” One thing is certain, though, I wouldn’t have expected this. Me, alone, stranded in my car at a standstill on a snowy motorway, my phone dead, tears removing my makeup quicker than any fancy product ever could. And my heart, breaking just a little. A bit of a mess, really. Of all the things I might’ve expected tonight, being a mess certainly wasn’t one of them. Not even close.

  I might’ve known this evening was set to be a disaster—“go to shit” as my brother, Dilly, would say. The unexpected slow-drifting snow, and in March of all months, the painful, stop-start traffic, the phone charger port in my ancient car dying again, arriving over a half hour late despite leaving home right on time and having, for once in my entire life, planned the journey bloody meticulously. Someone a little more superstitious might say they were all tiny warning signs or something—hints of things to come. Desperate little waves from the universe to “turn back now, Noelle!” and “Halt! I know you think it’s only right that you go tonight, and I know it’s been fifteen years, but trust us when we say it’ll be shower-of-arrows levels of deflating and you’re far better off turning around now and spending two days’ wages in that little drive-through Krispy Kreme and eating several dozen all the way home.” But despite myself, I was optimistic. Totally sick with a belly full of nervous eels, yes, of course, but I was hopeful. Even a little excited. To see my old college again—the place we spent two whole years, before we all turned eighteen and went off out into the world. I’d see old classmates grown up, old classrooms, the cafeteria in which we ate greasy chips and countless rubbery baked potatoes. I’d finally get to read the letter Daisy wrote to me before she died, too, and collect her camera; her final gorgeous moments captured safely on the film inside. Plus, I might see Ed again. We’d talk. Maybe even get a drink together, talk about where we went wrong—where we went to shit.

  Snow flurries faster against the windshield of my car now, like an upturned snow globe. We haven’t moved for ages. I’m not sure how long it’s been exactly, but it’s been long enough to send a text to Mum to tell her I’m stuck in traffic before my phone died in my hand, and long enough to read Daisy’s letter under the lemon-syrup glow of my car’s interior light. There’s been plenty of time to cry, too, and so much so I’ve had to blow my nose on the neon-green microfiber cloth we keep in the glove box to demist the windows, hoping no other drivers witnessed it. It was seeing Daisy’s handwriting that did it—the tiny Cs for the dots on the Is like new moons—and hearing her lively, smiling, almost musical voice in my head as I read. The little jokes. The mention of the red thread—a quote she’d read in a book and talked dreamily about for weeks. And seeing it all in black and white: everything I haven’t done.

  Behind me, a driver beeps their horn pointlessly, causing someone else to do the same. As if it’ll help, as if it’ll even have the slightest influence on the lines and lines of bumper-to-bumper traffic. A hot surge of panic bubbles up inside me. I swallow it down.

  Surely we’ll be moving again soon. There must be hundreds of us here on the dual highway—thousands even, all with homes and places and people to get to. They won’t leave us here for long before clearing or sorting whatever’s causing this, will they? The taillights of the car in front of me go out, as if answering, “Yes. Yes, they will, actually, Noelle,” and again, like fizz in the neck of a bottle, the panic rises in my chest. I turn up the radio.

  The camera wasn’t there. That’s something that hasn’t helped with the tears situation, either, the fact that Daisy’s camera full of twenty-four undeveloped photos wasn’t there in the time capsule. And granted, lots of things weren’t there tonight, including half of the attendees who’d sent in their RSVPs for the reunion, the photographer from the local paper, and the barbecue and beer tents the college had advertised. The snow and traffic had thwarted everything. But I know Daisy had put her camera in her plastic envelope along with her letter before it was buried all those years ago, and I’d known just from the weight of it when they handed it to me tonight, that it
wasn’t inside.

  “I’m afraid we haven’t unburied everything, because of the weather,” the new head of history said, sleeves rolled up, her cheeks a flustered cranberry red. “A lot of envelopes are in this time capsule, but the rest are in the other one, which is still in the ground and will be until we reschedule the reunion, unfortunately.” The hall behind me echoed and chattered with disappointed ex-students catching up with old friends with plastic cups of cheap wine, condensing lifetimes into ten-minute anecdotes, flapping about the weather, about canceled trains, about what a shame it was that the night had been ruined by snow.

  “I know. It’s just—the camera was in here,” I said. “Inside this envelope.”

  “I see,” the woman said. “As I said, it could be in the other vessel.” She handed me a pen and clipboard then. “If you leave your details here, we’ll let you know when we reschedule the event. And if we find anything.” And that was it—a scribble squashed on the bottom of a wonky register of names, before someone in a high-vis jacket pushed to the front to say they were going to close the doors in ten minutes. And it was then, turning away, heart sagging, my letter and Daisy’s envelope in my hand, that I saw Ed. Twenty-six and a half months since we broke up—since he got on that plane to America and flew almost five thousand miles away from me—there he was. Mere meters away in the college lobby, among bewildered ex-students and chattering voices, golden-skinned and bright-eyed and fresh in that intangible way people are after coming home again. New experiences and new places written all over them, a sheen on their skin. And he saw me immediately. Our eyes stuck like glue. And… nothing. Not a nod. Not even a tiny, awkward smile—just a frozen, icy moment before he turned and the automatic doors swallowed him up. Twelve years of memories together, of Sunday roasts and Christmases and mini breaks and watching me bleach my stomach hairs, and I wasn’t even worth a smile you’d toss a stranger in a supermarket, apparently. God. Beyond depressing. Doughnuts. I should’ve chosen the bloody doughnuts.

  Snow relentlessly tumbles outside, and as if synchronized, the sea of orange brake lights illuminating the slushy road ahead starts to go out one by one, like blown flames. Drivers giving up, engines killed.

  “A tune now,” says the DJ on the radio, “to warm us all up. And what a swizz we can never have this at Christmas, eh, because it really is coming down out there.”

  And he’s right. It is. Snow. Proper bloody thick, settling snow. And there is my phone, dead beside me, a black mirror on the passenger seat. No way of being able to pass the time scrolling on Instagram or Twitter, or replying to my friend Charlie’s text about Ed (“the man is a colossal prick, Noelle. A spineless little dweeb”), no way of dissecting it like two cut-price detectives, the whole non-exchange. And of course, no way of calling Mum—calling anyone for that matter. I try the charger cord again. Of course nothing happens.

  I let out a pointless “Shiiiiiiiiiit!” and cover my damp, hot face with my hands. A Harry Styles song plays on the radio—something about strawberries on a summer evening—and I could laugh at the irony of it, the temperature gauge at minus-five staring brazenly back at me, cars bumper-to-bumper on the road ahead, iced like buns. I can’t be stuck here. I can’t. Mum. What will I do about Mum if I’m stuck here for longer than an hour or two?

  It takes twenty tense minutes for the traffic sign ahead to light up its cheery Broadway letters to spell M4 CLOSED. MAJOR DELAYS, two minutes for the tears to start again (and for the demisting cloth to enter stage right again), and another five minutes before there’s a rap of knuckles on my passenger window.

  chapter two

  Uh, hi. Do—Do you need any help?”

  I stare at the man through the tiny crack in the passenger window: serious brown eyes, jet-black lashes, squinting as thick snowflakes fall.

  “Um. I—I was…” My voice is thick, as if there are balled socks in my throat. “I was trying to—”

  “It’s just I saw you with the phone,” he cuts in. He motions, waving his arm in the air in a deranged sort of way, before pushing his hand back into his coat pocket.

  “Oh. I see.” Brilliant. Just as I feared; other drivers did see my in-car meltdown. The tears, the swearing at nobody, the bloody microfiber cloth the color of ravers’ hot pants. “I had no signal,” I say, clearing my throat, sitting straighter as if to prove I am very stable indeed. “And now I have no battery. I was trying to get through to my mum.” I hold up my lifeless phone. “I did manage to send a text before it died. Luckily.”

  The man glances to his side at the road ahead, then back at me through the glass. “OK, well—if you need to borrow a phone or a charger cord—I guess, just shout.” He’s American, this stranger. Very American. My brother, Dilly, would probably be able to correctly guess which state he’s from after hearing just a few words from his mouth. Dilly is obsessed with all things America. The food, the movies, the funky little mailboxes, and how everyone eats cobbler (his words, not mine). He once even dated a man from Boston and spoke for a week in an American accent so obscure, that Ian next door sat us down and asked us very gently if he thought it was possible—and don’t be alarmed—that Dilly might’ve suffered an allergic reaction.

  “Ah, thanks. But it’s not the charger,” I tell the American. “It’s the port. The actual, erm—plug socket?”

  “Ah.”

  “Idiot brother broke it. Connecting up a laptop. Two days he was home for, borrowed the car, and that was it. Desperately needed to mix a demo, apparently. He only went out for tomato puree.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s a super old car,” I waffle on, as if this poor bloke cares, but I’m flustered, and short answers or silences beg for it, with me. I can’t help but want to fill up the space with words. Plus, he’s—well, there’s no arguing with science and nature. He’s really quite attractive, this man. Like… very. “The heater gets stuck on cold,” I drone on. “And sometimes the car even locks us in and point-blank refuses to let us out again.”

  “I see” is all he says, but I see a tiny twitch of a smile through the misty glass as if he somehow knows the heater is only broken because I spilled a can of Tizer on the dial. “Well, if you need to charge it, I’m”—he throws a glance over his shoulder to a parked black car beside mine, the interior light on inside, the door slightly ajar—“just there.”

  “Oh.” I nod. “OK. Thank you. But I’m sure we’ll be moving again in a few minutes.”

  “Optimistic,” he says, as if to himself.

  “Yes. Well, I hope.” And I do—I have to. Because Mum isn’t used to being home alone without me, and if I think too hard about it, about being stuck here, and about this whole disastrous evening, I might cry again, and this man—this whole motorway, in fact—has seen quite enough. Plus, I’m not expected home until after ten, which means there is still an hour to get there as normal, with no drama, no awkward encounters with strangers and strange cars and Americans with funky mailboxes.

  “OK, then.” He straightens, gives an awkward nod.

  “Thanks,” I say, “for offering,” and a moment later, my window is firmly shut, and he’s back inside his car beside me on the frozen tarmac.

  chapter three

  It’s amazing how painfully slowly half an hour passes when you don’t have a phone. I don’t like to think I’m addicted to my phone, or if I am, I’m certainly nowhere near as enslaved to it as my friend Charlie who spends every Sunday night strategizing how not to use her phone. “I’ve spent a working week on my phone, Noelle, despite telling every poor shit who’ll listen that I have no time,” she’ll say. “I used to get off on meditation. I used to get off on men with beards. But no, not now. Now I get off on a screen and an internet connection. It’s sad. A modern-day tragedy.” But without my phone, all there is to do is stare through the windshield, nibbling my fingernails raw, watching people duck out of their cars and into bushes to pee, reaching deep inside their car trunks, pulling out dusty old blankets or packets from shopping ba
gs as the snow just keeps on falling. A few moments ago, a driver in the next lane proudly pulled out a five-string banjo.

  News headlines roll in again on the radio, but they’re all the same as they were twenty minutes ago. Something about a footballer and a court case, then the nasally announcements of “snow blankets parts of the UK. Major delays. Roads closed. The public are advised to not travel unless necessary.”

  And maybe I should’ve listened to Mum—her pleas for me to stay home. “Gary at number twenty-one put on Facebook that it’s set to snow six inches, Noelle,” she’d said before I left, clutching the collar of her blush-pink dressing gown. “And he’s always right. He used to work for Millets.” But then, Mum doesn’t travel, even when it is necessary. It’s been three years since she went anywhere at all, or should I say, any further than the recycling bins in the front garden and the eight-weekly trip to the hairdresser and back, which she attends as if she is under house arrest and only has an allotted forty-five-minute window before the cops turn up to throw her over the bonnet of a car and chain her hands together. In and out, no cup of tea, no small talk at the till. If I listened to her, I wouldn’t really go anywhere. And where would the pair of us end up then?

  I glance over at the American in his car. I keep thinking he’ll catch me looking longingly over, like some sort of perv at a smoky bar, but the more time passes, and the more I try, again and again, fiddling pointlessly with the charger socket, taking out the wire and plugging it back in again, the more I have to accept I need help. Because I need to get through to Mum, and it’s obvious now, with bush wees and banjos as evidence, we’re not going to be moving anytime soon.

  I push open my car door and get out. Snow showers my face as I slip on my coat. This borrowed, thin-as-cigarette-paper dress: definitely one of my shittier ideas. It’s freezing.