My parents are polite even when they are disapproving and so despite my mother voicing her thoughts on my relationship with Luke, they did what they believed parents should do when their child is emigrating. They dropped me off at the airport. They told me to eat vegetables. They wept when I peeled myself out of their hugs. They made me promise to text when I landed.
‘Look after her,’ said David to Luke in the arrival hall.
‘I’ll look after myself,’ I said, mock-outraged but then glancing at Luke quickly, in case that sounded like I was dismissing him.
Luke was too distracted by his phone to have noticed. I exhaled.
I didn’t know, then, quite how much I could look after myself. How far I could go. That actually, rather than the one who should be scared, I was the one to fear.
‘You can look after yourself most of the time,’ David quipped, ‘I’m talking about when you get drunk.’
I started to tease him about a drunken night out he’d had the week before that was far more extreme than anything I had done recently, but Luke talked over me, mid-flow.
‘We need to go,’ he said, brusque. ‘Get through security.’
I saw my mom note the interruption.
It was left for David to give the whispered last-minute aside into my ear.
‘I am here,’ he said, holding my head in his hands. ‘Any time, whatever time zone.’
He kissed my forehead.
I nodded, unable to speak because I was so overwhelmed by how much I missed him already. How could his scent cross the Atlantic? How could a look, a shared eye-roll at our parents? How could just being together, silently, like siblings are? I was trying so hard to hold in my sobs that I gagged and he held me tightly.
But later, I laughed, too. What would I, a together grown-up travelling abroad with a partner, need my naive little brother for?
The next time I saw him, he’d have flown halfway across the world to pick me up from a police station.