Soul Fire

be Sahara?’ he surprises her with a quick, confident embrace, and then holds out his
hand to shake Ade’s hand, ‘and Adrian. Delighted to meet you. Alice has told me all about you. What you’ve done for her.’
    ‘Oh. Right. Well, we’ve tried our best,’ mumbles Sahara.
    ‘Don’t you recognise me, Bill Gates?’ Cara demands.
    Lewis grins and gives her a hug. ‘How could I forget you, Cara? Now, where was I? Drinks, right? What can I get everyone?’
    ‘White wine and soda,’ says Cara.
    ‘I’m sticking with Coke,’ I say, pointedly, even though this situation is getting so odd that maybe it’ll only seem normal after an alcoholic drink.
    When Lewis goes to the bar, Cara leans in close to me. ‘Romantic, or what? It’s like a Hugh Grant movie.’
    ‘Rubbish! He’s working.’
    ‘Looks good in a suit, too. Who’d have thought it?’
    ‘I didn’t notice.’ I was so surprised to see him that I hadn’t thought about what he was wearing till now. But his linen suit fits him so well it must be tailor-made.
    ‘Nice arse,’ she says, then giggles. ‘Don’t worry, I only have eyes for Ade. But you should have ordered wine. Soft drinks make you look like more of a kid in his eyes.
Not a woman.’
    ‘I don’t want him to see me as a woman,’ I hiss back. But then, I don’t want him to see me as a little kid, either.
    ‘How are we doing for time?’ Ade asks Sahara.
    Sahara looks up from her phone, checks her watch, then leaps up from her chair. ‘Shit. We’re late. We might be denied boarding, you know these budget airlines.’ And she throws
her khaki-rucksack onto her back and starts to run.
    We struggle to keep up. She could be a soldier on exercise. Cara ends up slugging her white wine on the way to the gate, while Ade tries to keep up with Sahara, and Lewis and I do a fast walk on
the travelator together, trailing behind.
    ‘Why do I get the feeling this is going to be one of those trips, Ali?’ he says.
    ‘I still can’t get over you being here.’
    ‘The conference will be worth it. Plus . . . well, I’d like to get a measure of this Zoe girl. You know how I love a puzzle. Not to mention a bloody great bonfire.’
    ‘I think the fireworks might kick off before we get to Barcelona,’ I say.
    ‘Hmm. Sahara seems very intense.’
    ‘I’d forgotten you’d never met her before. It just seems like you’ve been part of our lives forever and ever. Sahara is odd, though. It never made any sense that she was
my sister’s closest friend at college.’
    Lewis shakes his head. ‘No, I can’t see the two of them sharing much of a world view.’
    I really wish he wouldn’t say stuff like that. Stuff that suggests he actually knew my sister, when he’s always insisted he didn’t. ‘Perhaps she was a different
person once she got to uni.’
    ‘People are bloody unpredictable, Ali. That’s why the objects of my desire generally have lightning-fast chips and a serious oversupply of RAM.’
    And he grins in that self-conscious way that always makes me relax.
    When we get to the gate, Sahara is hyperventilating because the queue’s so long. I look out of the triple-height window and I see the plane and I freeze.
    Flying’s never bothered me before, so why do my legs feel as though someone has sliced through all the muscles? Then I understand: this is about Danny. Danny died when his plane fell out
of the sky and smashed onto the desert below. Until I met him, crashes happened to strangers, in strange lands. Now they’re terrifyingly possible.
    ‘You OK, Alice?’ Cara says, and I realise I’m blocking the tunnel that leads onto the plane.
    ‘Sorry,’ I mumble at the tutting passengers behind me. We’re at the plane door and Cara pushes me inside with a no-messing shove on the small of my back. I fall into the cabin,
and the steward has to catch me.
    ‘Wow, you’re keen to get there, aren’t you, sweetheart?’ he says.
    I’m trying not to freak out as I breathe the stale-air smell. There are too many seats packed into too little space.
    ‘Over there,’ Cara says, steering me into the fifth row. ‘The nearer we are to the front, the sooner we get off the plane.’
    And the closer we are to the emergency exits.
    Meggie would laugh at me. She loved flying. She told me she knew it was only a matter of time before she turned left into first class instead of right into economy. She was going to spend her
flights sipping champagne or wrapped up in cashmere, before