Non-Refundable

The departure board said GATE 12 — BOARDING, and Nadia Okafor said, out loud, to nobody, "I'm completely fine."

It was the fourth time she'd said it that morning. The first had been to Theo in the taxi, the second to a security guard who'd asked her to remove her belt, and the third to a self-checkout machine at Boots that had accused her, in a woman's voice, of an unexpected item in the bagging area. The item had been travel-sized paracetamol and a small, aggressive quantity of duty-free spite. She had bagged it fine. Everything was fine.

Theo Sharma stood beside her with the calm of a man who had read the entire situation, filed it, and decided to say nothing about it yet. He had one hand on the telescopic handle of her rolling case — the good case, the honeymoon case, the case she'd bought in a fit of optimism six weeks ago — and the other hand in his pocket, and he was looking at her the way he looked at spreadsheets that didn't add up.

"You're doing the thing," he said.

"I'm not doing a thing."

"You're saying you're fine in the specific voice you use when you are the opposite of fine. It's a bit like a smoke alarm. The more insistent it gets, the more I want to check the oven."

"There's no oven, Theo. There's a gate. There's a flight to Lanzarote leaving in—" she checked the board, and her stomach knotted, "—thirty-five minutes, and a prize holiday I won fair and square, and there is absolutely no oven."

"Right." He nodded slowly. "Except the booking's in the name of Mr and Mrs Osei."

And there it was. The word she'd been walking around all morning like it was a wet paint sign.

Osei. Daniel's name. The name she'd been eight days away from taking, before Daniel had sat her down on their own sofa — their sofa, the one they'd assembled together with an Allen key and a bottle of Rioja and a genuine, documented sense of a future — and told her, with terrible gentleness, that he wasn't sure. Not that he didn't love her. That he wasn't sure. As if love were a parking space he might want to keep circling the block for, just in case something closer to the entrance came free.

Seven days ago. She'd counted. She counted things now; it was one of her hobbies, along with entering competitions and pretending.

"The booking," she said, in the bright brittle voice, "is non-transferable, non-refundable, and non-negotiable. I read the terms. I read all of the terms. I read them in bed at three in the morning when I couldn't sleep, which, incidentally, is also when I entered the competition, because it turns out that the correct response to being left is not crying, it's entering forty prize draws in a single week like a woman possessed."

"Forty."

"Forty. I won a slow cooker, a year's supply of oat milk, a caricature portrait of a pet I don't own, and this." She gestured at the gate, at the whole gleaming machinery of holiday. "A seven-night couples retreat at Resort Los Amantes, Lanzarote. The Lovers. Couples only. For lovers." She heard her own voice climb. "And I am not going to stand in that check-in queue and be the woman who won a honeymoon and lost a fiancé in the same fortnight, Theo, I am not going to be a human interest story, I would genuinely rather die on this specific patch of Gatwick carpet."

A family with three children and a pushchair swerved gently around them, the way people swerve around a raised voice at an airport, as though it might be catching.

Theo waited until they'd passed. This was a thing he did — waiting — that Nadia had never decided whether she found soothing or insufferable. His sister did the opposite. Priya filled every silence like she was worried it might charge her rent.

"So don't be a human interest story," he said mildly. "Come home. Eat the loss. I'll drive us back and we'll get a Nando's and you can tell Priya you decided Lanzarote was too on-the-nose."

"I can't eat the loss. It's twelve hundred pounds of loss. It's an entire wedding photographer's deposit of loss."

"So it's about the money."

"It is absolutely about the money."

"It's not about the money."

"It's a bit about the money."

"Nadia." He said her name the way you set something breakable down on a table. "It's about not letting him win."

She looked at him then, properly, for the first time since the taxi. Theo Sharma, twenty-six, her best friend's little brother, in a grey T-shirt and the sort of jacket that suggested he'd once glanced at a weather app. Steady brown eyes. A face that gave nothing away and somehow, infuriatingly, always seemed to have already seen everything. He'd shown up at her flat at six that morning when she'd texted the group chat a picture of the boarding passes and the words does anyone want a free holiday, no strings, absolutely no strings, asking for a legally binding reason — and Priya had replied with eleven question marks and ON A WORK DEADLINE BABE CAN'T, and Theo had replied with nothing at all, and then simply arrived.

"You didn't have to come," she said.

"I know."

"You could have let me do this by myself and be tragic about it."

"I know that too."

"So why are you here?"

Something moved behind his eyes and was gone, filed, the oven door closing. "Because I owe you," he said. "You know I owe you."

And she did. She knew exactly the size of what he owed her — knew it to the penny, to the excess, to the phone call she'd made two years ago in a voice so steady the insurance man had believed every word of it. Yes, it was me driving. Yes, I understand. No, no one else was in the vehicle. She had never once said it out loud to him. She wasn't going to start under a departures board.

"I don't keep a tab," she said.

"I do." He said it simply, like a fact about the weather. "Get on the plane, Nadia."

The gate agent's voice crackled over the tannoy. Final call for passengers on flight EZY8817 to Arrecife. This is a final boarding call.

The queue at the desk had thinned to a straggle. A woman in a Los Amantes-branded lanyard — because of course the resort had a rep at the gate, of course it did — was beaming at a young couple, checking their names against a tablet, saying something that made them both laugh and lean into each other. Newlyweds, obviously. Radiating it. The woman looked up, scanned the dwindling gate, and her eyes found Nadia and Theo, and her whole face performed its swoop — soft, delighted, professional. Ah. There they are. My last little pair.

She started towards them.

"Oh, God," Nadia breathed. "She's coming. She's got a lanyard and she's coming."

"Then we've got about eight seconds to decide who we are," Theo said, and it was the we that undid her, casual and total, the way he'd already stepped over the line without making her ask.

"Theo—"

"Because I'm not going to stand here and watch you get called Mrs Osei by a stranger with a tablet," he went on, low and quick, still smiling pleasantly at the middle distance the way you smile at an approaching wasp. "So either we go home right now, or we're married. There isn't a third door. You have to pick one, and you have to pick it before she reaches the barrier."

Nadia's heart was going like a drawer full of cutlery in a fast car. The word married sat in the air between them, absurd, enormous, a joke she could turn into a tragedy or a tragedy she could turn into a joke, and those had always, always been the only two things she knew how to do.

"We can't just be married," she hissed. "People will ask things. Couples know things about each other. They know how you take your tea and which side of the bed and the—the anecdotes, Theo, married people have a repertoire—"

"Milk no sugar. You steal the duvet. And in a crisis you go very calm and very posh, which you're doing now." He said it without looking at her, watching the lanyard woman navigate a family and a spilled Fanta. "I've known you six years. I can do this if you can."

"You've known me as Priya's mate—"

"I've known you." A beat. The oven door, cracking, just for a second. "Trust me, I can do this."

The rep was fifteen feet away. "Los Amantes?" she called, warm as a bath. "You must be my honeymooners! Cutting it fine, you two — I nearly gave your suite to the birds!"

And Nadia Okafor — who had spent seven days being fine, who had won a slow cooker and a caricature of a phantom dog, who could not, would not, be a woman anyone felt sorry for — felt the choice close over her like water, and reached out, and took Theo Sharma's hand.

His fingers folded around hers. Warm. Steady. Not even a flicker of surprise, as though he'd been waiting years for her to do exactly that, which was a thought she absolutely did not have time to have right now.

"That's us," she said, and the bright voice came out perfect, wifely, glowing. "So sorry — my husband refuses to walk quickly through an airport on principle."

"It's a moral position," Theo agreed, deadpan, shaking the woman's hand. "Airports want you to run. I decline."

The rep laughed, delighted, ticking her tablet. "Oh, you're going to be trouble, the pair of you, I can tell. Mr and Mrs Osei — passports, when you're ready, my loves."

The name landed. Nadia felt Theo's grip tighten, just slightly, over the small stumble of it — Osei, Daniel's ghost stitched into the booking — and she thought, wildly, that she should have foreseen this, that the whole con had a crack running right through its foundation before they'd even left the ground.

But Theo didn't miss a beat.

"Actually," he said, smooth as anything, producing his passport and hers from his jacket in one clean movement, "it's a whole saga. She kept her name. We're doing the modern thing — the booking's under Osei because that's how she won it, but I answer to absolutely anything. Husband. Sir. Oi, you." He handed the documents over. "Six years and she still hasn't decided what to call me."

"Six years!" The woman pressed the passports to her chest like a small bouquet. "And still like newlyweds. Oh, Esperanza is going to adore you two." She scanned the passports, waved them through, beaming. "Gate's just here. Welcome to the beginning of the rest of your lives."

Nadia walked down the jet bridge holding her fake husband's hand, her rolling case rattling behind her over the metal joins, the recycled cold air of the plane breathing towards them, and somewhere under the ringing in her ears she was already doing the maths, already building it — where they'd met, how he'd proposed, what lie they'd tell about the ring she wasn't wearing.

"We met at your sister's birthday," she said under her breath as they reached the aircraft door, smiling at the cabin crew. "Four years ago. You spilled a drink on me."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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