The paramedic—I wish he had a name—said, “He wants to know if you’ll bring the dog . . .”
I stepped back, creating necessary distance between us. “I can’t . . . I don’t even know these people . . .” But it didn’t feel right to leave. Sunny agreed, tugging me toward the open truck, clawing at the dirt until a plume of dust rose up.
“Normally it’s against regulations, but I’ll make an exception . . . for the boy,” he said.
“I can’t,” I repeated, cursing myself for needing honey that morning. For knowing I wouldn’t be home when Philip walked through the door.
From the look on his face, Ben was biting back a string of emotions, and the glaring vulnerability reached inside me. Without thinking, I let Sunny pull me forward, pushing aside thoughts of Philip. Philip, whose red-eye from Los Angeles would be arriving in Miami any minute. Philip, who would be wondering where I was, expecting our reunion—intimate and often sweet. Instead, I thought of this little boy, innocent and fresh-faced like any one of my former students, the ones whose needs had always surpassed my own. The familiar twinge beckoned me to act, and soon I was inside the vehicle.
CHAPTER 2
May 2016, Back Then
United Airlines Flight 517 from Miami, Florida, to Kansas City, Missouri
Philip likes to tell the story of how we first met. He calls it a combination of fate and circumstance, and I chuckle because it was really the result of an equipment change at one of the country’s busiest airports. I shouldn’t have been flying that rainy day. And Priscilla, the principal at the school where I taught, shouldn’t have insisted I attend a professional development workshop so close to final exams—all the way in Coral Gables—but I could never say no to Priscilla or her suggestions for personal enrichment. It meant extra work, but I’d always been able to juggle.
I hadn’t been to Miami before, and the city’s vibrancy clung to me like the steamy weather. Perhaps it was the information provided in the seminars—innovative ways to inspire the kids—that had me buoyant and unfazed by the humidity. I was flying back to Kansas City that afternoon. The local news had predicted rain, but we were greeted with far worse. Hard balls of hail crashed against the roof of my Uber, and threatening tides flooded the streets. As I arrived at the airport, the digital monitors buzzed with delays, and when our incoming plane diverted to West Palm Beach, we were forced to board a different plane.
I took my seat in row thirteen, knowing full well the associated superstitions. Passengers were winding down the aisle, the sound of their shuffling mixing with the outside storms. Strapping myself into the window seat, I felt cautiously optimistic that the seat between me and the elderly woman on the aisle would remain empty.
Until Philip came crashing down the narrow walkway.
It’s in poor taste, I might add, to describe this man’s entrance into my world, on a plane, as a crash, but it fit. Philip was pissed. His sculpted cheeks were lit up, the lips puckered, and his brilliant blue eyes baffled. If he wasn’t snapping at the flight attendant, I’d have said he was handsome like the men on Game of Thrones, but the flared nostrils mixed with a testy arrogance stripped him, and me, of any kindness.
“This is a first-class ticket,” he roared in a thick English accent at the slight figure who guided him to my row. The woman, with her coiffed brown hair and grayed roots, tried explaining that equipment changes were out of their control and this new plane was incidentally smaller. “Your row has dissolved into economy. I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do.”
He waved his first-class ticket as if it could stretch the plane and magically create a row for him to slip through. I was tossing around variations of smug jerk, insults to describe the man who was about to land on the seat beside me. “This is outrageous . . . I can hardly fit my legs in front of me!”
“Sir,” the woman continued, “we’re sorry for the inconvenience. I can assure you when we land in Kansas City our customer-service staff will reimburse you for the difference. For now, I need you to take a seat and buckle up.”
“Reimburse me?” he hollered. “I can purchase this tiny plane!” The passengers witnessing the exchange winced with disapproval, but the woman in the navy blue jumper, hands on hips, was undeterred. Reluctantly, the man shimmied his way through the cramped space and took the seat to my left. The older woman he crushed along the way kindly offered up her seat. “Maybe you’ll have more if you sat here,” she said with a smile. And he smiled back. “You’d do that for me?” And all I kept thinking was, Yes, great idea. Please don’t make me sit next to this guy. And when he opened his mouth to speak, I was prepared to ask her to switch, but he surprised me, and 13D, with, “I’d never make a lovely woman move out of her seat for me.”
Soon he was buying us drinks and gushing over Margaret’s grandchildren, whom she had left behind in Homestead. I wanted to dislike him. I wanted to recall the repugnant way in which he bemoaned the downgrade and his flamboyant flaunting of money, but there was something in his eyes that was too forgivable and too blue. I excused his earlier arrogance, chalking it up to petty airport drama that turned any of us into unrecognizable people. He apologized to Anne when she came by with her beverage cart, and even she found his charm enough to excuse the earlier insolence. His accent was less pervasive when he spoke in soft, gentle tones, and he bought the entire cabin a round of drinks to make up for his incorrigible behavior.
The flight to Kansas City was scheduled for three hours and twenty minutes.
On that day, the hailing Florida weather stretched it into an unsavory five. Flight 517 was at the very end of a lengthy line of planes scheduled to depart, and once it was our turn, we had to wait another fifty minutes for a band of lightning to pass.
By the time we were airborne, Margaret was snoring in her chair—she never drank during the day—and I was engrossed in the movie I had downloaded on my iPad. Philip was a tall man, and his legs would accidentally knock against mine, our shoulders brushing over the armrest that divided us. But his nearness was far more than proximity. He was so close, I could feel his eyes running up and down my skin, assessing me, studying something I didn’t yet see.
Every so often, I’d take my eyes off the screen to steal a glance in his direction. It was obvious from the man’s meticulous dress, the pink kerchief tucked in his navy blazer’s breast pocket, that he was refined and accustomed to getting his way. When he apologized for kicking my tray table, I noticed the lopsided grin and the paleness that drenched his cheeks. And what began with casual niceties, prompting me to pause the screen, turned into a gentle probing.
“I’m from Kansas City,” I replied to the first of his many questions. “Flew in for a conference.”
“I’ve never actually met someone from Kansas City,” he answered, before changing his mind. “Take that back. I’ve never met a woman from Kansas City as lovely as you.”
I laughed, which seemed to disappoint him. “Lovely,” I repeated. “You said the same thing to Margaret.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Then he motioned to my tray table. “What’s that you’re watching?”
Gabriella Wilde was splayed across the frozen screen in her waify blonde beauty, Alex Pettyfer nearby. “She’s attractive,” he said, and I liked the way the word sounded on his tongue. “You look like her,” he added, pointing at the blonde goddess on my screen. The alcohol and altitude had clearly affected him. I looked as though I had eaten Gabriella Wilde.