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hurriedly switched it off.
    ‘I love you,’ Ronnie mouthed across the aisle at him. He mouthed it back. Ronnie had told all her family members that she loved them. Whatever happened now, they would know what they meant to her.
    But of course the take-off proceeded without incident. As soon as the seatbelt sign was switched off, Mark reclined his chair and inserted his iPod headphones in his ears. With Sophie sulking and Jack asking questions all the way – ‘If heaven is in the sky, how come we can’t see it now we’re up here?’ – by the time Ronnie and her family were landing in Lanzarote, Ronnie definitely felt a little bit less inclined to tell Mark again that she loved him.

Chapter Five
    Chelsea
    While Ronnie was in the air, Chelsea was settling in for an unexpected day in an airport hotel. She flicked on the television. Hundreds of channels and nothing she wanted to watch. She stared at her iPhone as if staring might cause it to beep with a new message. It was nearly midday and there was not so much as a single word of acknowledgement from Davina that Chelsea’s hard work on the Eugenia Lapkiss article had been worth it.
    After an hour spent watching The Jeremy Kyle Show , Chelsea began to think she should have gone back into London after all. She certainly could have done without spending the extra money on this coffin-like room at the Gatwick Shangri-La, but in her panic at the thought of a second early morning with its attendant potential for missing another flight, she had shelled out £100 for the privilege of being just thirty minutes away from the airport rather than an hour and a half. The salesgirl hadn’t mentioned that this particular ‘airport hotel’ was closer to Brighton than Gatwick. Chelsea would still have to get up before seven to get the complimentary bus to the terminal.
    Chelsea slumped back against the pillows.
    Sometimes it felt like she never got a break. How had she ended up at this place? Not just at an airport hotel but at this place in her life. Supposedly ‘successful’ with her sophisticated London magazine career but somehow still skint and living in a dump and absolutely single. An unwanted memory of Colin the banker, her last boyfriend, came to Chelsea’s mind. What was Colin doing that morning? Not eating stale biscuits from a minibar, that was for certain. His lovely fiancée was probably squeezing him some fresh juice. Yep, that waste of space Colin Webster, who always claimed he would never marry, had recently become engaged to some stick-thin 24-year-old model whose father owned a chain of clothing stores, just three months after dumping Chelsea. How come he got to find love again when Chelsea was stuck in a nightmare of Internet dates that inevitably made her feel worse than getting no dates at all?
    Chelsea’s phone chimed. As though someone had read her mind – someone with a nasty sense of humour – she had an email notification of a new ‘fan’ on one of the dating sites she had forced herself to sign up to. Feeling momentarily hopeful that this could be the email that changed her life, she clicked through the link to discover that her new fan was an unemployed IT specialist who still lived with his mother. He looked like Beaker from The Muppets . The mere fact that he thought he might have a chance with Chelsea was profoundly depressing.
    I must stay optimistic, Chelsea told herself as she deleted her new fan. She needed a new plan. That’s what she would do with her free day at Gatwick: think about her future and make plans. She’d been so busy lately that she’d lost sight of where she was going. That was all. She had a pile of self-help books in her hand luggage (including From Booty Call to Bride , a manual dedicated to ‘helping a woman move from one-night stand to wife material’). She could use this time in the airport hotel to do some reading and refocus, the importance of which she had only recently explained to the readers of Society in a