She was charming, funny, and headed to the same city as me. We laughed about life until she pulled out her phone to show me the man she was flying to meet. That’s when the world went cold.
The apartment had that hushed, late-morning stillness I usually loved, the kind that came after Michael left for another trip and the door clicked shut behind him.
I zipped the small carry-on that lay on the bed and glanced, one more time, at the framed photo on his desk. The three of us at the lake, his hand on my shoulder, the little scratch on his wedding band catching the sun.
I straightened the frame the way I always did.
“He’s going to lose his mind when he sees me there,” I said out loud, to no one.
I pictured his face in the hotel lobby. Me holding two coffees like I’d just walked in from a normal morning.
Three days apart had become three weeks of small distances, and I wanted to close it before it became something else.
At the gate, I second-guessed myself once.
“You almost didn’t come,” I whispered, tightening the strap of my bag. Then I boarded anyway.
My seat was by the window. The woman beside me looked up from her phone and smiled, wide and easy, as if she’d already decided to like me.
“Oh, thank God,” she said, laughing. “I’m glad someone nice ended up next to me.”
“Usually that bad?”
“You have no idea. Last month I sat next to a man who clipped his nails the entire flight.”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
“I’m Patrice,” she said, offering her hand. “I know, I know. My mom wanted a boy.”
“Anna.”
“Anna. Pretty.”
The plane rolled back from the gate, and something in me loosened. She had that quality some people are born with, the kind where three hours disappear into one conversation.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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