Ashley had planned the whole thing down to the coffee. She would leave work at two, catch a rideshare to O’Hare, and be waiting at the international arrivals gate by three, holding nothing dramatic, no balloons, no flowers with paper wrapping that crinkled when you touched it, just herself, dressed well, ready to be the kind of wife who surprised her husband at the airport after a week apart. She had thought about it the night before while eating dinner alone and decided it was exactly the kind of small gesture that kept a marriage from going entirely soft at the center.
They had been married for four years. The routine had been settling over them the way routines did, gradually, without announcement, until she noticed one morning that they had stopped asking each other questions during breakfast and had started simply occupying the same space in companionable silence that was perhaps not as companionable as she had been telling herself. The airport plan felt like a corrective.
A small reinvestment. She left the office at ten past two, having stayed a few extra minutes to make sure everything was covered, having told Susan she would be available by phone if anything came up. Susan had looked at her with the appraising expression she gave everything and said fine, be here Monday at nine sharp.
Ashley had thanked her and meant it. On the way to the airport the traffic on the Kennedy was what it always was on a Friday afternoon, which is to say a slow, crowded, slightly resentful procession, and Ashley sat in the back of the rideshare with her bag on her lap and her phone open to the airline app, checking the status of the London flight every few minutes the way you check something you already know is fine but cannot stop monitoring. The flight was on schedule.
No delays. The afternoon had that particular quality of things proceeding exactly as hoped. She arrived at O’Hare forty minutes before the scheduled arrival, which gave her time to find a table at the Starbucks in the terminal and drink a cappuccino while watching the arrivals board.
She felt slightly festive. She felt, if she were being honest with herself, a little nervous, the way you feel when you are doing something kind for someone you love and are hoping the gesture lands the way you intended it. The arrivals area was busy in the way of Friday afternoons at international terminals, families with handmade signs, couples who moved toward each other with the unhurried certainty of people who have done this reunion enough times to know it will hold, a man with balloons, a woman in a yellow coat holding a coffee for someone who had not yet appeared.
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