By the time I came out of Terminal C, my shoulders felt like somebody had hung cinder blocks from them.
I had been gone six days for a business trip that started in Houston, turned into two extra nights in Dallas, and ended with a delayed flight back to New York that left me living on airport coffee, stale protein bars, and whatever salad I could stab with a plastic fork between meetings. All I wanted was home. A hot shower.
My old bed. My mother’s beef stew.
My mother always made beef stew when I came back from a trip. It was her way of putting the whole world back in order.
I was twenty-six, old enough to manage client presentations worth six figures and polite enough to answer emails at midnight, but in moments like that I still wanted the same thing I wanted when I was ten: to walk into our kitchen at the end of a long day and smell onions softening in butter, thyme in the pot, and one of my mother’s rolls wrapped in a clean dish towel.
The airport was a Friday mess of suitcase wheels, crying toddlers, rideshare confusion, and people talking too loudly into phones.
A woman in a camel coat nearly clipped my shoulder with a garment bag. Somebody behind me was arguing with an airline agent. The smell of roasted coffee drifted out from a kiosk near the exit.
I pulled my carry-on around the corner toward baggage claim’s outer corridor and stopped so hard the wheels skidded sideways on the polished floor.
At first I thought I was just tired.
That was the only explanation my brain would accept for the shape I saw near the coffee kiosk, partly hidden behind a column and a rack of overpriced travel neck pillows.
A man stood there with one hand on the telescoping handle of a pale pink suitcase. His other arm was looped around the waist of a very young woman in a white sundress.
Not beside her.
Around her.
Protective. Familiar.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
