Thirty-Six Questions, Badly

The board at gate B31 had been a calm, reassuring blue all afternoon. At 3:52 it turned red one line at a time, from the top, like a row of dominoes going over in slow motion. DELAYED. DELAYED. DELAYED. Then, with the air of a machine that had been waiting all week to say it: CANCELLED.

Elias stood very still and read the line for Portland twice, as if it might be persuaded to change its mind.

Outside the great windows of concourse B, Denver had disappeared. An hour ago there had been mountains out there. Now there was a white wall. The snow wasn't falling so much as travelling, sideways, at speed, with somewhere urgent to be. The nearest plane was a grey ghost of itself. The one beyond it had gone entirely.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the gate agent into her microphone, in the voice of a woman who has delivered a great deal of bad news in her time and has stopped apologising for weather, "the FAA has issued a ground stop for Denver International. All departures are cancelled for the remainder of today. Rebooking information is in your app. Peña Boulevard is closing at five. If you are planning to leave the airport tonight, I would plan to do that now."

Elias took out his phone, like everybody else, and opened the airline app, and watched a small grey wheel turn and turn. Then Elias opened his messages instead and typed, with his right thumb, to Joelle in Oregon: Snowed in at Denver. Don't panic. It's Thursday. Your wedding's Saturday. There is so much time. And then, because it was true, and Elias had a professional policy of honesty with brides: Probably.

The answer came back in four seconds. It was eleven exclamation marks and a picture of a goat. Elias decided to take that as calm.

The hotels went in the next forty minutes, one by one, like the last chairs in a game of musical chairs. Finally, on the fourth page of results, with one star and a photograph of a fireplace, the Plainsview Hotel & Conference Center, a mile off Peña by the commuter-train stop, said it had limited availability.

Elias booked nothing, because the website then crashed. But the last train out to the Plainsview stop was leaving in nine minutes, and Elias ran for it with everything he owned bumping along behind and a sentence going round and round in his head that he had said at two hundred and twelve weddings and never once thought about properly: for better, for worse.

The train was standing-room only, warm and wet and smelling of coats. It slid out of the tunnel into a white roar, and for ten minutes there was nothing to see out of the windows at all except Elias's own reflection: black hair gone wild with static, hazel eyes looking more tired than Elias would have liked, and behind Elias, at the far end of the car, a very tall man in a grey cardigan, holding the overhead rail and reading something on his phone with total concentration, as if the snow were a minor administrative matter that would be dealt with in due course.

The Plainsview lobby was chaos. There was no other word for it. There were people sitting on suitcases, three crying toddlers and one crying adult. There was a gas fireplace, burning bravely. There was a laminated easel by the door that said STORM UPDATES in red marker, with nothing written under it but a drawing of a snowflake with a sad face.

And there was the desk, with one woman behind it in a blazer and a headset, typing very fast, with the kind of calm that only comes from having given up on calm hours ago. Her badge said MARISOL. NIGHT MANAGER.

Elias reached the front of the line at 5:31. The very tall man in the cardigan reached it at exactly the same moment, from the other side, and they both stopped, and looked at each other, and then at Marisol.

Marisol looked at both of them over her glasses.

"I have two rooms left," she said. "That's it. After that it's cots in the ballroom. One is the Summit Suite on the seventh floor, which has a king bed, a view, and a jacuzzi I would not personally sit in. The other is Room 117, next to the ice machine, which has a double bed and the ice machine." She held up two key cards like a dealer showing a hand. "I don't care who gets which. I've been here since six this morning. You can work it out between yourselves, or I can give them both to the people behind you."

The tall man looked at Elias, and there was a pause in which each of them recognised that the other had been about to say something sensible and polite and was now reconsidering.